Best 40 quotes of Kamila Shamsie on MyQuotes

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

Can I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow.

Decisions. Where, what, why. Can't handle them. So I'm prolonging the indecision with higher education.

Don't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? You were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to me when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my cultural references were the sign of a colonized mind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love is like an eternal flame, once it is lit, it will continue to burn for all time.

No self-respecting feminist could argue with the claim that the novel is more likely to accept existing power structures than not. But there's a vast difference, surely, between Dickens saying Indians should be exterminated and a Dave Eggers writing eloquently about the NSA, but not being as outspoken on American military power abroad.

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.

That's what I want for my life. I want to go to Peshawar... Because there's more past than present there. Two and a half thousand years of history beneath its soil. How long a list of reasons do you need?

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.

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.

The world won’t get more or less terrible if we’re indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate,’ Kim said. ‘Though it’s possible it will seem slightly less terrible if there are marshmallows in the hot chocolate.

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.

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.

Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?" "Cant help it. It's the company I keep.

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.

All around us, Karachi kept moving

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.

Can angels lie spine to spine? If not, how they must envy us humans

Character is just an invention, but it's an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. - Broken Verses

Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.

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.

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 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.

How do you eat your roots?

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.

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.

If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.

My ex calls the ochre winter 'autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.— Broken Verses

People don't change.' 'People change entirely,' I said. 'Look at Narcissus. Became a flower. I call that change.

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

There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.

The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.

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.

We went to school in a place without the sun,and believed this means we had no need of our shadows.

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.

Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make anything less valuable.