Quotes from Shamim Sarif

Every night I empty my heart, but by morning it's full again. Slow droplets of you seep in through the night's soft caress. At dawn, I overflow with thoughts of us An aching pleasure that gives me no respite. Love cannot be contained, the neat packaging of desire Splits asunder, spilling crimson through my days. Long, languishing days that are now bruised tender with yearning, Spent searching for a fingerprint, a scent, a breath you left behind.

It was the downfall of love, Lamia thought wistfully, that it inspired the lover to toss away any shred of caution just to obtain the pure, desperate pleasure of talking about the beloved.

Lamia was not sure whether she liked Leyla. She was too quiet, too knowing, her eyes were always probing, she felt, and she was clearly a bad influence on Tala, enticing her to museums and libraries when she should be shopping.

She had been trying hourly to ensure that this new friendship remained such, to be certain that it would not slip out of the careful grasp of her fingers and into the darker champers of her heart.

Maya repeated the achingly slow process with the remote control in reverse, and in the profound quiet that ensued, looked at Leyla. 'Why are you doing this to me?' Yasmin turned on her mother. 'She's not doing anything, she is gay. It's not a choice. So I think, actually, that you should be telling us why you have such a problem with it.

I want to be with someone who, ten years from now, still makes my heart jump when I hear her key in the door. And that someone is you.

There was light and there was darkness, and where once, so recently, he had sat at his desk bathed in that light, now he was clothed in the black cover of heartbreak.

I need you ready in ten seconds'' ''As my boyfriend told me last night

Precious stones need sculpting before they become gems.

That her own self-deception and self-absorption, her own slavery to the society and family in which she had been brought up, had reduced this blameless man to a weeping wreck struck her as horrific. She saw more clearly than she had ever seen before that she must change, or keep hurting the people who truly loved her.

It was not his custom or his pleasure to listen to gossip or instructions from people who were strangers to him, even if they did share the same skin colour, or religion, or traditions.

Thousands of years of language and literature and we haven't come up with something better than these two, tired words - I'm sorry - to express sympathy for a loss.

Maybe we need thousands of smaller heroes every day every day instead of the occasional big one.

SHE HAS BEEN SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH in the courtyard

she guesses and she is briefly grateful that the large quadrant

The shiny, varnished seating,

Thousands of years of language and literature and we haven't come up with something better than these two, tired words -I'm sorry-' to express sympathy for a loss. Maybe because deep down we know that nothing we say can help someone who's suffering.

You can train weapons and fighting techniques, but you can't train that kind of courage and willpower. You either have it or you don't.

She had long ago become accustomed to routine, to a life where each day often differed little from the one that had gone before, but this was something new, a mass of time that sat heavily upon her, and that had somehow welded itself unevenly into an unmarked stretch of consciousness.

Boston – November 1998

Moscow – March 1956

Acknowledgements Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Eighteen

is hardly more gripping the second time around, and