Top 74 Kamila Shamsie Quotes
#1. Seeped into his bones from decades of sitting outdoors in
Kamila Shamsie
#2. 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
#3. Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn't make anything less valuable.
Kamila Shamsie
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. He put his arm around me. That was all. He put his arm around me and we didn't say a word.
Kamila Shamsie
#14. Can angels lie spine to spine?
If not, how they must envy us humans
Kamila Shamsie
#15. 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
#16. Barriers made of metal could turn fluid when touched simultaneously by people on either side ...
Kamila Shamsie
#17. You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.
Kamila Shamsie
#18. Difficult but worth it
that's how my mother had once describe life with Omi.
Kamila Shamsie
#19. My ex calls the ochre winter 'autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark. - Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. He hung up so gently, I didn't even hear the click.
Kamila Shamsie
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Samia, it appeared, had become one of those desis who drink Pepsi in Pakistan and lassi in London.
Kamila Shamsie
#26. 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
#27. Character is just an invention, but it's an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. - Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
#28. 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
#29. ...and i will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you.
Kamila Shamsie
#30. 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
#31. Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?"
"Cant help it. It's the company I keep.
Kamila Shamsie
#32. 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
#33. Desiring the unattainable; that's all this is about,
Kamila Shamsie
#34. 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
#35. So many things you promise yourself you won't get used to, and then you do.
Kamila Shamsie
#36. 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
#37. If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.
Kamila Shamsie
#38. 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
#39. Is love stronger when it let's go or when it holds on?
Kamila Shamsie
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#45. 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
#46. Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.
Kamila Shamsie
#47. 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
#49. The truths we conceal don't disappear Raheen, they appear in different forms
Kamila Shamsie
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. He had tears in his eyes even as he told her not to cry.
Kamila Shamsie
#53. Decisions. Where, what, why. Can't handle them. So I'm prolonging the indecision with higher education.
Kamila Shamsie
#54. We went to school in a place without the sun,and believed this means we had no need of our shadows.
Kamila Shamsie
#55. There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn't learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.
Kamila Shamsie
#56. 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
#57. 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
#59. 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
#61. Its a moonsmile. No light of its own unless there's a sun for it to reflect off
Kamila Shamsie
#62. 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
#64. 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
#65. When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? - Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
#66. 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
#67. Love is like an eternal flame, once it is lit, it will continue to burn for all time.
Kamila Shamsie
#68. All right, don't scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins.
Kamila Shamsie
#70. 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
#71. Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same.
Kamila Shamsie
#72. 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
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