Prerna > Prerna's Quotes

“… 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

“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

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

“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

“The truths we conceal don't disappear Raheen, they appear in different forms”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Yes, I’d still have Sonia. And Zia. And so many other things that Karim no longer had. I’d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promoted ‘Garunteed no cockroach’, and, yes, there’s still be those bottles of creamy, flavored milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani; oh, yes, yes, yes, and all that, and all that again. So why complain? Why contemplate words like ‘longing’?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“He had tears in his eyes even as he told her not to cry.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“you can only know how you feel in the here and now, not how you’ll feel years, months or even days down the line.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“What do you do from morning to night?"

"I endure myself.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Sometimes the best argument is the one that we refuse to have.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“You cannot fast-forward time, you cannot rewind it, and you cannot pause it; you can only waste or benefit from it.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“If you don't take risks, you'll have a wasted soul.”
― Drew Barrymore

“It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”
― Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

“You can have it all. Just not all at once.”
― Oprah Winfrey

“Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to.”
― Lao Tzu

“Time is a game played beautifully by children.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“Sadness was so claustrophobic.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness...”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn't believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn't leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“But the child shouldn't be blamed for the father's crime, she tried to reason with herself, then. But should the child therefore also enjoy the father's illicit gain?”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night, warm, mammalian. His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his feet, ad he felt an unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of falling asleep, a baby on his mother's lap. Thousands of people were out though it was almost eleven. He saw a pair of elegant bearded goats in a rickshaw, riding to slaughter. A conference of old men with elegant goat faces, smoking bidis. A mosque and minarets lit magic green in the night with a group of women rushing by in burkas, bangles clinking under the black and a big psychedelic mess of colour from a sweet shop. Rotis flew through the air as in a juggling act, polka-dotting the sky high over a restaurant that bore the slogan "Good food makes good mood". Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home - he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing - that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly.”
― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

“Of one thing, though, she was sure: "I want to travel," she confessed.
Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her, the pages going by so fast, her heart in her chest - she couldn't stop... And pictures of the chocolaty Amazon, of stark Patagonia in the National Geographics, a transparent butterfly snail in the sea, even of an old Japanese house slumbering in the snow... - She found they affected her so much she could often hardly read the accompanying words - the feeling they created was so exquisite, the desire so painful.”
― Kiran Desai , The Inheritance of Loss