Kamila Shamsie Quotes

Why have the English remained to English? Throughout India's history conquerors have come from elsewhere, and all of them --- Turk, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Persian --- have become Indian. If --- when ---this Pakistan happens, those Muslims who leave Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad to go there, They will be leaving their homes. But when the English leave, they'll be going home.
Kamila Shamsie
For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?
Kamila Shamsie
The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.
Kamila Shamsie
Character is just an invention, but it's an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. - Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
Difficult but worth it-- that's how my mother had once describe life with Omi.
Kamila Shamsie
All around us, Karachi kept moving
Kamila Shamsie
Abdullah to Kim Burton: "War is like disease. Until you've had it, you don't know it. But no. That's a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold that stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war - countries (America) like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. Tt's why you fight wars more than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.
Kamila Shamsie
Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.
Kamila Shamsie
We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.
Kamila Shamsie
Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make anything less valuable.
Kamila Shamsie
How do you eat your roots?
Kamila Shamsie
If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.
Kamila Shamsie
There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.
Kamila Shamsie
This is the worst of our ways of remembering--this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism.
Kamila Shamsie
Can angels lie spine to spine?If not, how they must envy us humans
Kamila Shamsie
Grief was the deal God struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overheard, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them to never turn around.
Kamila Shamsie
Bijli fails in the dead of night / Won’t help to call “I need a light” / You’re in Karachi now / Oh, oh you’re in Karachi now. / Night is falling and you just cant see / Is this illusion or KESC / You’re in Karachi now
Kamila Shamsie
Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question “What do these people have to do with us?” and “What are we doing out there in the world?
Kamila Shamsie
So she became a woman who held her head high, not in arrogance, or contempt, but because she knew that it was a form of cowardice to make a choice and then pretend you didn’t really make it
Kamila Shamsie
Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.
Kamila Shamsie
I still hear the world spinning.
Kamila Shamsie
There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.
Kamila Shamsie
I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.
Kamila Shamsie
You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.
Kamila Shamsie
If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he's always known to be a dream, then he's among the fortunate ones.
Kamila Shamsie
When the war's over, I'll be kind.
Kamila Shamsie
If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.
Kamila Shamsie
We never actually have serious conversations about anything for more than 20 seconds. So there’s a beautiful superficiality to our relationship which sometimes gets covered up by all the genuine affection flowing back and forth.
Kamila Shamsie
They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.
Kamila Shamsie
This world is out of date
Kamila Shamsie
There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.
Kamila Shamsie
I'll fall.''You wont fall.''I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. 'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.
Kamila Shamsie
My ex calls the ochre winter 'autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.— Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? - Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food.I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.
Kamila Shamsie