Kamila Shamsie Quotes & Sayings

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

His fingers bent forward at the topmost joint pushing down against the tips of my nails, and his thumb rested lightly against the mole on my index finger. i thought of mosques and churches and prayer mats. Hands clasped together; one hand resting atop the other; fingers interlocked to mime a steeple. What sacred power is invested in hands?
This is not to say I was having pious thoughts. — Kamila Shamsie

And it was this: raze to the ground the mausoleum you have just started building for the bones of your ancestors and your descendants and those who come in-between. Make that land a holy shrine for pilgrims from everywhere. — Kamila Shamsie

Those Genes Could Have Been Mine — Kamila Shamsie

But, Miss Spencer, I should strike a note of caution. I know there have been women archaeologists in Greece, in Turkey. Even Egypt. But this is Peshawar. Pathan men don't much like the idea of women ... '
'Don't much like the idea of women doing what?'
'Don't much like the idea of women. — Kamila Shamsie

I'll read to you," Elizabeth said. "Any preferences?" "Evelyn Waugh." "Really? How strange." "That's what Konrad said. He said Waugh is for readers who know the English and understand what's being satirised. And I told him that maybe the books are better when you don't know it's satire and just think it's comedy." Elizabeth considered this. "You're probably right. I find him much too cruel. And almost unbearably sad." Hiroko's — Kamila Shamsie

When the war's over, I'll be kind. — Kamila Shamsie

Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won't. The unmanned drone hovering over Pakistan, controlled by someone in Langley, is an apt metaphor for America's imaginative engagement with my nation. — Kamila Shamsie

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

The next day it's Virginia Woolf who wafts through. Hers is a
curiously insistent presence; take your eyes off her for a moment and
the next thing you know she's rearranging your syntax as though it
were cutlery improperly laid out for a seven-course meal with some
foreign dignitary who disdains your nation's table manners. — Kamila Shamsie

I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this, and with just a tiny bit of luck so will everyone you love. — Kamila Shamsie

Sitting on the divan, she touched a finger to the bullet wound in his chest. It seemed so small, so incapable of creating the exodus of blood which had drenched his clothes and skin as he lay in the hospital, waiting for her to claim him. Death has been instantaneous, they said, as if there were a relief in that. She did not want death to have been instantaneous; she wanted to have at least held his hand as he lay dying and said goodbye to him in terms other than the, 'Why are you doing again? You'll find nothing. Stay. Oh all right, go,' that had been her farewell to him that morning.

Stay. Stay. Stay. She should have repeated it like a madwoman, banged her head against the wall in a frenzy, hit him and wept. She should have said it just one more time, just a little more forcefully. She should have taken his dear, sweet head in her hands and kissed his eyes and forehead. Stay. — Kamila Shamsie

The shaking had stopped, outwardly, but her mind couldn't hold a thought for any length of time without splintering apart. She took a deep breath, thought of a cliff above the sea, the taste of figs on her tongue, a man's finger touching the jut of her wrist, the sea so blue she thought it might drive her mad though she understood nothing of madness then — Kamila Shamsie

Grief never leaves, It merely sinks into you. — Kamila Shamsie

Its a moonsmile. No light of its own unless there's a sun for it to reflect off — Kamila Shamsie

How do you eat your roots? — Kamila Shamsie

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

I still hear the world spinning. — Kamila Shamsie

That night as I cried myself to sleep I knew that, somewhere in the sky, Karim was doing the same; and some of my tears were his tears, and some of his tears were mine. — Kamila Shamsie

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

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. — Kamila Shamsie

If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you. — Kamila Shamsie

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. — 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

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

I will not be in here for ever, I promise. All metaphors need to come up for air. When I can bear no more of separation, when I have learnt all that absence can teach me of desire, the walls will shimmer and I will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself. — Kamila Shamsie

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

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

On those days, Hasan understood what Ami had meant when she said that there are memories that cannot be spoken of, because to speak of them imperfectly is to rob the of something vital, though to leave them intact, inside, is to leave no space for anything else in your life. — Kamila Shamsie

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

There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn't learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart. — Kamila Shamsie

... 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

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 — Kamila Shamsie

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

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

I am not an Englishman, nor are you. Nor can we ever be, regardless of our foxtrots, our straight bats, our Jolly Goods and I Says.
No more the Anglicized Percy, I.
I am now Taimur Hind. — Kamila Shamsie

This world is out of date — Kamila Shamsie

Your mother and I had one conversation a little before she died. She was sitting in the garden one evening when I came home from work, and she said, "I have to confess something. When we played 'chicken' from KDA to Clifton and I said I made you run three red lights, I lied. I made you stop even when they were only just turning amber." And I replied, "Samina, I didn't love you because you were the girl who ran red lights. I loved you because when you covered my eyes with your hands, I knew I could trust you to get me home." She was afraid of running red lights, Aasmaani. She wasn't an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary. — Kamila Shamsie

All right, don't scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins. — Kamila Shamsie

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

I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn't about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.' It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long. — Kamila Shamsie

Why didn't you stay?' she has whispered against the unyielding stone. Why didn't you stay? She pressed the berry against her lips. Why didn't I ask you just one more time to stay. — Kamila Shamsie

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

It's true, that in concrete battles the tyrants may have the upper hand in terms of tactics, weapons, ruthlessness. What our means of protest attempt to do is to move the battles towards abstract space. Force tyranny to defend itself in language. Weaken it with public opinion, with supreme court judgements, with debates and subversive curriculum. Take hold of the media, take hold of the printing presses and the newspapers, broadcast your views from pirate radio channels, spread the word. Don't do anything less than all you are capable of, and remember that history outlives you. It may not be until your grandchildren's days that they'll point back and say, there were sown the seeds of what we've now achieved. — Kamila Shamsie

If a man is to die defending a field, let the field be his field, the land his land, the people his people. — Kamila Shamsie

He put his arm around me. That was all. He put his arm around me and we didn't say a word. — Kamila Shamsie

Samia, it appeared, had become one of those desis who drink Pepsi in Pakistan and lassi in London. — Kamila Shamsie

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

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. — Kamila Shamsie

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

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

At Vipers, when the German gunners shot Afroze who chose to cry out his grief knowing the consequences rather than bear the death of a beloved in silence, a whisper burbled across the field: Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun. The men of the 40th, not all of them Muslim, whispered the words for the two dead men, and the prayer would have reached the gunners as wind on water or the sighs of ghosts. — Kamila Shamsie

Difficult but worth it
that's how my mother had once describe life with Omi. — Kamila Shamsie

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. — 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

So many things you promise yourself you won't get used to, and then you do. — Kamila Shamsie

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

Don't, please, don't disappear. — Kamila Shamsie

The truths we conceal don't disappear Raheen, they appear in different forms — Kamila Shamsie

...and i will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you. — Kamila Shamsie

This is the worst of our ways of remembering
this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism. — Kamila Shamsie

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

I can see you, out there, reading between the lines. Come home, stranger. Come home, untangler of my thoughts. Come home and tell me, what do I do with this breaking heart of mine? — Kamila Shamsie

All around us, Karachi kept moving — Kamila Shamsie

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. — Kamila Shamsie

Seeped into his bones from decades of sitting outdoors in — Kamila Shamsie

Is love stronger when it let's go or when it holds on? — Kamila Shamsie

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? — Kamila Shamsie

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. — Kamila Shamsie

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

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

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

He hung up so gently, I didn't even hear the click. — Kamila Shamsie

Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question "What do these people have to do with us?" and "What are we doing out there in the world? — Kamila Shamsie

When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? - Broken Verses — Kamila Shamsie

The absence of the Beloved is Hell, is imprisonment. And that absence fuels love until the prisoner becomes a conflagration of yearning. Sometimes the absent beloved is a woman, sometimes it is democracy, sometimes it is the dreams of youth. But always, always, separation is just a catapult to a new level of love. Each time he was imprisoned, each time he and my mother were forced apart, he would write to her - half-teasing, half-tender - of his immersion in that metaphor. In part because he believed it; in part because he would do everything he could to keep her from pain. — Kamila Shamsie

Desiring the unattainable; that's all this is about, — Kamila Shamsie

I was the girl who could be anything-that's what my teachers used to say, and I believed them. I just never realised that 'anything'could include this. — Kamila Shamsie

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. — Kamila Shamsie

Why didn't you stay?" she had whispered against the unyielding stone. Why didn't you stay? She pressed the berry against her lips. Why didn't I ask you just one more time to stay? Sajjad stood up quietly and walked over to her. "There is a phrase I have heard in English: to leave someone alone with their grief. Urdu has no equivalent phrase. It only understands the concept of gathering around and becoming 'ghum-khaur' - grief-eaters - who take in the mourner's sorrow. — Kamila Shamsie

They have made me understand how the City can get under your skin, and never be sweated out. I mean, it's still aesthetically traumatic, but it's got spirit. — Kamila Shamsie

Barriers made of metal could turn fluid when touched simultaneously by people on either side ... — Kamila Shamsie

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

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

You have this ability to find beauty in weird places. — Kamila Shamsie

Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same. — Kamila Shamsie

There were moments, Hasan, when I like to think that the stars are bullet-holes. For every bullet shot by an oppressor there springs to life a star, with so great a radiance that it can never be put out, it can never be imprisoned. But if that really were true, the last three months in this city would have erased every trace of blackness from the sky. — Kamila Shamsie

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

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

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

He had tears in his eyes even as he told her not to cry. — Kamila Shamsie

At what point does character-playing become habit, something for which we are grateful because it allows us to go through the world with the ease that comes from being predictable to ourselves, even if that predictability takes the form of neurosis, hysteria, depression? And at what point does that habit turn darkly into addiction? I wiped my hands clean. We are so desperate to be explicable to ourselves, to rely on ourselves, that we need to believe a certain version of who we are even when evidence starts to mount that the version is a lie, even when the part of us which is not tamed by habit strains to break free and overwhelm the tired, repetitive creature that our character has become, mouldering at the edges. — Kamila Shamsie