Quotes from Kamila Shamsie

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

All the wrong choices he made, they were necessary to get him to the right place, the place he is now.

who knew everything about her rights and nothing about the fragility of her place in the world.

He had tears in his eyes even as he told her not to cry.

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.

My ex calls the ochre winter 'autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.— Broken Verses

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who among us has never been moved to tears, or to tears' invisible counterparts, by mention of the word 'home'? Is there any other word that can feel so heavy as you hold it in your mouth?

and i will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you.

At Vipers, when the German gunners shot Afroze who chose to cry out his grief knowing the consequences rather than bear the death of a beloved in silence, a whisper burbled across the field: Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun. The men of the 40th, not all of them Muslim, whispered the words for the two dead men, and the prayer would have reached the gunners as wind on water or the sighs of ghosts.

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.

Desiring the unattainable; that's all this is about,

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.

Laughing, he said, "Cancer or Islam—which is the greater affliction?

Ghum-khaur: devorador-de-mágoas, aquele que absorve o desgosto do enlutado.

There were moments, Hasan, when I like to think that the stars are bullet-holes. For every bullet shot by an oppressor there springs to life a star, with so great a radiance that it can never be put out, it can never be imprisoned. But if that really were true, the last three months in this city would have erased every trace of blackness from the sky.

The volume was off, allowing for some pleasing moments of synchresis, such as when the dogs were released from their cages just as the front door was hurled open by a drunk, or when the strip light overhead started to buzz and the on-field umpire batted midges away from his face.

In his prison poems, the bars on his windows are merely the grid through which he sees shooting stars, each lash of a whip is a reminder of the insecurity of tyrants, and a rumour that orders for his execution have been dispatched is reason to weep for the executioner.

By the time the first light appeared in the sky she felt herself transformed by the desire to be known, completely.

if your head is in the shade of love then surely your feet are in paradise.

You think marriage is in the large things, Mrs. Rahimi had once said. It's in the small things. Can you survive the arguments about housework, can you learn to live with each other's different TV viewing habits.