Karachi Quotes

“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

“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

“Constantine cursed the faujis again, and then he cursed Tom Cruise for having made that bloody Top Gun movie. Since then, an entire generation of faujis had grown up thinking they could be like him just by buying those cheap rip-off sunglasses for 200 rupees from Zainab Market.”
― Omar Shahid Hamid, The Prisoner

“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

“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, Salt and Saffron

“All around us, Karachi kept moving”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Jinnah told my father", he (Ardeshir Cowasjee) said, "that each government of Pakistan would be worse than the one that preceded it.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.”
― Bilal Tanweer

“for the first time I am confronted with the fact that places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them.”
― Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“When we build a city, we take our grandest dreams as well as our deepest anxieties and set them in concrete for the next generation.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it...We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.”
― Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“Ever seen a bullet-smashed windscreen?
The hole at the center becomes an eye. You see less through it but you gain focus, sharpness. That's how it is -- our wounds become our eyes. Seeing outside becomes seeing inside.
Listen.”
― Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“What appears strange and complex becomes stranger and more complicated once you begin to investigate it. That's the true nature of the world.”
― Bilal Tanweer

“If you come to Karachi for a few days you will hate it, but if you come to Karachi for forty days, you will love it and never want to leave.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“The morning drive in Karachi was nothing like coasting on Storrow, but it hadn't taken Asad long to get used to it and it rarely bothered him now. Dreadful road manners were part of the traffic landscape in Karachi. Vehicles changed lanes without warning, motorcyclists zigzagged in and out, camel and donkey carts fought for road space, rickshaws spewed carbon and sulfur fumes, jaywalkers kept popping up from nowhere, and beggars, beggars and more beggars congregated at every traffic light.”
― Saad Shafqat, Breath of Death

“That was the strange problem with writing, you had discovered. Meaning never matched the words and words always evaded the thought.”
― Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“Karachi has been a destination for some of the most dramatic migrations of all.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“I hid myself behind Baba. It was like being in the shadow. Shadows are empty places in things. The colour of shadow is also black, which is the color of empty things. Blackboard is also black when it is empty No one can draw shadows on blackboards because shadows keep on changing. You cannot draw changing things. But it happens, you know; you draw and you look and it has changed.”
― Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“It hits you in unexpected moments, this city's romance; everywhere, air pockets of loveliness just when your lungs can't take any more congestion or pollution or stifling newspaper headlines.”
― kamila shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Things taste sweeter when you have some hunger left to linger. You feel it hunting your head for buried things; digging into the fractures of your breath warm and greedy.”
― Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“people who ran away are friends!”
― Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“a city is all about how you look at it”
― Bilal Tanweer

“My dear, you are not one person. You have many people in you, and each one can ask only some kinds of questions.”
― bilal tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“Now, standing here, it is clear as day: more than anything else, you want to find words for what you feel and think and everything that is dark. And then this terrifying thought hits you: Yes, your father wrote poetry to find a language for his wounds. Yes, you in your own way have become your father”
― Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here Is Too Great

“From 1947, the country had unwittingly conducted a vast human experiment: what would happen if a diverse place suddenly cleansed itself of many of its minorities, so that almost everyone was, on the surface, the same?

Now the results of the experiment were coming in.

Muslims, the single "nation" championed by their leaders just a few years before, proved to be strikingly diverse. They always had been. Now some looked within their numbers and began singling out new minorities to replace the ones they had lost.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“Is it possible to leave Karachi after living here for so long?”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“I like to believe that I have a better understanding of ground realities than those who live in airconditioned elite areas in Dubai and Karachi.”
― Reham Khan, Reham Khan

“While sitting on the stage with Qazi, waiting for her answer, she wondered if she had helped him with a pure heart, or if it was an attempt to emotionally force him to marry her, or if it was an emotional or sexual relationship with him.”
― Aqsa Abdul Qadir, Wealth In The Treehouse: Stories of Karachiites

“Karachi has always been home, so why does every goodbye feel like a breakup?”
― Natasha Jadoon, Filmi Kismet

“Karachi’s air hung heavy, thick with a sun that induced sweat. The best thing about Karachi is that despite the heat, the winds would find their way every evening. The winds came in loyal, but late.”
― Natasha Jadoon, Filmi Kismet