Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

Those Genes Could Have Been Mine

A man needed fire in his veins to burn through the world, not ice to freeze everything in place.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

barriers made of metal could turn fluid when touched simultaneously by people on either side...