Quotes by 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. ”

“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, thei...”

“Theres a ghost of a dream that you dont even try to shake free off because youre too in love with the way she haunts you.”

“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 hav...”

“If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.”

“How do you eat your roots?”

“All around us, Karachi kept moving”

“Difficult but worth it-- that's how my mother had once describe life with Omi.”

“Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesnt make anything less valuable.”

“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 f...”

“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 lappin...”

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

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

“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?”

“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 --...”

“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 some...”

“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 plumme...”

“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.”

“This world is out of date”

“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 af...”