Quotes from Kamila Shamsie

Don't, please, don't disappear.

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, their footsteps overheard, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them to never turn around.

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

What would you stop at to help the people you love most? Well, you obviously don't love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.

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.

Grief never leaves, It merely sinks into you.

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

All around us, Karachi kept moving

She felt, as she did most mornings, the deep pleasure of daily life distilled to the essentials: books, walks, spaces in which to think and work.

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.

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

I still hear the world spinning.

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.

grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence

I'm driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things," Hira said in her most professorial voice. "And they underestimate other people's willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.

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.

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

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

Contempt, disdain, scorn: these emotions were stops along a closed loop that originated and terminated in a sense of superiority.

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

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

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.

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.

People don't change.' 'People change entirely,' I said. 'Look at Narcissus. Became a flower. I call that change.