Kamila Shamsie > Quotes

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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, Broken Verses: A Gripping Mother-Daughter Story of Political Activism, Crime, and Suspense in Modern-Day Pakistan

“You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire

“How horrifying that morning when you wake up and your first thought is not of the person who has left. That’s when you know, I will never die of a broken heart.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Salt and Saffron

“Grief manifested itself in ways that felt like anything but grief; grief obliterated all feelings but grief; grief made a twin wear the same shirt for days on end to preserve the morning on which the dead were still living; grief made a twin peel stars off the ceiling and lie in bed with glowing points adhered to fingertips; grief was bad-tempered, grief was kind; grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence; grief tasted like bile, felt like blades, sounded like all the noise of the world. Grief was a shape-shifter, and invisible too; grief could be captured as reflection in a twin’s eye. Grief heard its death sentence the morning you both woke up and one was singing and the other caught the song.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire

“Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?"
"Cant help it. It's the company I keep.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Is love stronger when it let's go or when it holds on?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“So many things you promise yourself you won't get used to, and then you do.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows

“Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire

“Decisions. Where, what, why. Can't handle them. So I'm prolonging the indecision with higher education.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Salt and Saffron

“Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“… and that’s why they leave, isn’t it? Because they have to see themselves in the context of something larger than just the two of them. It’s like that Faiz poem, you know, mujh say pehli si muhabat, when you’ve seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can’t go on pretending none of it matters, you can’t pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world. And that two of them, when they come back to the city, that’s when they find out that their love was imperfect because it couldn’t bear the knowledge of everything that lies outside…”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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

“How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows

“How do you eat your roots?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“I don't believe in love at first sight, neither do you. But I know...that sometimes it only takes a few minutes to recognize that a person is capable of breaking your heart.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Salt and Saffron

“When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? - Broken Verses”
― 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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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, Burnt Shadows

“This world is out of date”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish - both names that you can find more than once on our family tree.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Salt and Saffron

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“And yet. When I read the Dawn on line and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that I understood the unspoken as much as the articulated among its inhabitants; I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing; I knew I couldn’t think of Karachi and find any easy answers, and I didn’t know how to decide if that was reason to go back or reason to stay away.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“We went to school in a place without the sun,and believed this means we had no need of our shadows.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Salt and Saffron