The Bad Muslim Discount Quotes

“...being with someone is an acquired skill. There is an art to it. Basically, you have to watch your partner take a chisel - or a war hammer, depending on the day - and chip away at the ideal version of them that you've created in your mind. The person you fall in love with is always slightly different from the person you need to stay in love with. More real and more flawed, but also more complex and better defined.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“All men are created equal. Except not really, because some men are created American. Other men are created rich. Some men are created American and rich and are still not content with the world they inherit, so they try to change it. They try to make it more to their liking by painting it with blood and flame.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“I am saying that you should read everyone else's story with the same respect as you do your own.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“How you begin things is important. This is true in checkers and in life, because at the beginning of things you are freer than you will ever be again. Once the game starts, every move you make is influenced by what someone else has done. The longer the game goes, the messier the board becomes, the more that influence grows. But the opening, Anvar, belongs to you.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Clocks cannot measure time. They can count seconds, minutes and hours, but those are not accurate measures of our experience of time. A day of hunger is longer than a day when you've eaten. How quickly time passes isn't constant. An hour can stretch out and seem unending. A year can pass you by before you know it.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Yet you are not modest like a Muslim woman. Your dress betrays what is in your heart.”
Zuha was wearing a simple long-sleeved shirt with dress pants. No one, except for Abu and his friends, could have had any objections. I was certain, however, that he thought her pants highlighted her legs too much, and her shirt emphasized her waist more than necessary.
I was still thinking about what to say when Zuha answered him. She spoke sweetly, but her words had the edge of a knife. “And your gaze betrays what is in yours”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“We live on stolen land,' I finally said, 'in a country built on slavery and reliant on the continued economic exploitation of other people. The oppressor always lives in fear of the oppressed. Americans have always been afraid-of those native to this continent, of Black people, or Japanese citizens they interned, and now of Muslims and immigrants. So the real question, I think, is who is next?”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“My point,” she said, “is that all your heroes were wanderers upon this earth. Moses, Jesus, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Ishmael, Muhammad…The history of the world is the history of people who went places. People who walked to the horizon.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Checkers is the game of life,” she said. “Idiots will tell you that chess is, but it isn’t. That’s a game of war. Real life is like checkers. You try to make your way to where you need to go and to do it you’ve got to jump over people while they’re trying to jump over you and everyone is in each other’s way.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“You know, Anvar, people don’t understand these days,” he told me, “the real sacrifice. They think their offering is the money they spend on the animal. Or they think it is the life of the animal. But it isn’t. You are the sacrifice. What you are feeling now? That is your sacrifice. The lives of other creatures are not yours to take. Life is precious and to end one is final. Remember to never take more from the world than you can give back to it.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“I’m just saying, look for the truth. Look past the slogans and the spin and what people say their motivations are. Look at what they are actually trying to do, at the world they really want to create, and once you know the truth about them, if you still want to stand with them, to vote for them, go ahead.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Humanity, as a whole, has a lot of practice in dealing with death. Only individuals struggle with it.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“There is no true measure of pain. Each hurt is unique,”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“I suppose we have to change the national anthem then.”
“You want to take out ‘the land of the brave’?”
“No,” he protested. “The whole thing has to be replaced.”
“With what?”
“With Britney. Remember ‘Oops!…I Did It Again’?”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Experience, you see, can be lethal to certainty.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“...we should be honest about who we are and what we do. We should tell the truth about things, even when it doesn't sound good or feel good or sell well. It's not enhanced interrogation, it's torture. It's not an extrajudicial killing, it's murder. We should call things by their real names. I'm just saying, look for the truth. Look past the slogans and the spin and what people say their motivations are. Look at what they are actually trying to do, at the world they really want to create, and once you know the truth about them, if you still want to stand with them... go ahead.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Azza said something that's been bothering me. She told me that there is no beauty left in this world. She's not wrong, you know. Sometimes that is how life feels. It's like there is nothing good, nothing noble, nothing precious left. Everywhere I look there is only pain and struggle and just a shadow over everything. You should know that I never feel that way when I am with you. You're the light of my world. You make the universe beautiful.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Should we be guided by our limits or our priorities?”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“The greatest reassurance of religion is the promise that there is someone out there-- someone with all the power in the universe-- who cares about you. He records your life, listens to your prayers and wants to ease your pain. The moment that I took God out of the equation, the world became too large, too cruel and too indifferent for me to live in. I decided then that there was a God. There had to be. I needed Him.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“For Abu too,” I said. “The more guns, the better. We are Americans now.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“We don’t take from the world what we can’t give back to it.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“damage we do to each other, to the world, survives us. In the time we have, we must consider the consequences of”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“The lives of other creatures are not yours to take. Life is precious and to end one is final. Remember to never take more from the world than you can give back to it.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“The choices we make are ultimately always about ourselves, about who we are, instead of other people, don't you think? I did what I had to do to be who I am.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“There's not a single moment of my life that has not been better because you were with me. And that is all we are. Moments. You and I and everyone. That's what life is. It's just time, and it's ending, Zuha. Everyone is ending. Who really cares what anyone else thinks? We have to steal our happiness in the time we've been given. And you're right. The past is messed up. It's broken. So what? Time doesn't care about that. Time keeps happening and we can do it right moving forward because time's like water, like a river, like the monsoon. Its like the rain. You can't break the rain.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Every kid from the subcontinent knows that there are three acceptable career paths you can walk down. You can become a doctor, you can become an engineer or, if you are painfully slow, you can study economics or finance.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“A man can life a good life wherever he finds himself, I think."

"But not an easy one.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“The sea speaks to you when you’re born by the ocean. It sings to you. If you stand still, just out of reach of the water for long enough, you begin to sense a small echo of the infinite inside yourself, and in the violent crashing and breaking of waves you begin to feel at peace. It was something I would miss.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“The world is difficult sometimes for restless minds and imaginative hearts. Things go easier for you if you do what you’re told, when you’re told, and never ask any questions.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount

“Maybe. But you are different. You don’t fight others. You fight the Great Jihad. The Prophet said that the fight inside a man, the fight for his soul, is the greatest struggle of all, yes? The fight between the white brown man and the brown white man. The fight between the good bad man and the bad good man. I see it in you all the time.”
― Syed M. Masood, The Bad Muslim Discount