Fatima Bhutto > Quotes

“My Country
I don't have any caps left made back home
Nor any shoes that trod your roads
I've worn out your last shirt quite long ago
It was of Sile cloth
Now you only remain in the whiteness of my hair
Intact in my heart
Now you only remain in the whiteness of my hair
In the lines of my forehead
My country
-Nazim Hikmet”
― Fatima Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir

“Bhutto’s case was not a trial of murder, rather it was the overt murder of a trial -”
― Fatima Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir

“Greece is internationally famous for three reasons. First it has more islands than people. Second, it used to be a part of Turkey. Third, its national hero, Alexander the Great, was a Yugoslavian.”
― Fatima Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir

“Don't cry," Samarra whispered, "Nothing ever happens to the brave.”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

“That's the thing with betrayal- it's always the people you love.”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Runaways

“You will have to pay for your choices much more than you realize.”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

“He said her name, repeatedly, so that she never lost the sound of his voice around it. So that every time someone called her name, she would be able to hear only Aman Erum.”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

“But show me just this one thing, my darling, i seek a heart stained like a poppy flower.”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

“I thought i could wake up this sleeping country with my cries, but still they sleep as if in a dream.”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

“Second, the press, which has never been braver since, fought against martial law through covert resistance, or as the government called it ‘deviant behaviour’.”
― Fatima Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir

“...the gods bless the lonesome through music and dance.”
― Fatima Bhutto, New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi and K-Pop

“It's stories that will remain long after we and our puny troubles are gone, circulating in the ether, passed on to loved ones, told and retold until they crumble, becoming dust, until one day someone notices a grain somewhere and stops to look.”
― Fatima Bhutto

“He seemed to have no fear”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Hour of the Wolf

“I say little because against a gnawing, ferocious sleeplessness, what power do we truly have? No matter your body's drooping helplessness, your eyes refuse to close. You lie awake listening to the quiet, then the birds, then the cars, then people speaking and realize you've lost the entire night. Your forgone sleep claws at you like an itch, making you angry and aggressive all day. You can't nap or else you won't sleep again at night. You can't work because you haven't slept, and every word said to you is an assault on your poor, tired mind.”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Hour of the Wolf

“The more people came to Nara, the more they endangered the deer, officially designated Japanese national treasures in the late 1950s. What does that tell us of our relationship to beauty? We are concerned only by our hunger for it. We are ravenous, and careless. We need beauty to survive this bad world, but we care nothing for how it survives. We feed our garbage to the mystical deer that we travel distances to gawp at. We know we are doing it, but we don't think about anything other than our needs.”
― Fatima Bhutto, The Hour of the Wolf