Quotes from Kamila Shamsie

Kun ihminen on yhdeksänkymmentäyksi, parasta mitä uskaltaa toivoa on se, että olisi hyvin säilynyt. Mikä tarkoittaa, että näyttää säilykkeeltä.

You don't mind the exclusivity, you just mind that you aren't part of it, Layla had said once, as if this was a Maryam-specific attitude rather than absolutely everyone's objection to exclusivity.

Aneeka must learn to think of him as lost forever. It was possible to do this with someone you loved, Isma had learned that early on. But you could learn it only if there was a complete vacuum where the other person had been.

Konrad had been right to say barriers were made of metal that could turn fluid when touched simultaneously by people on either side.

The shaking had stopped, outwardly, but her mind couldn't hold a thought for any length of time without splintering apart. She took a deep breath, thought of a cliff above the sea, the taste of figs on her tongue, a man's finger touching the jut of her wrist, the sea so blue she thought it might drive her mad though she understood nothing of madness then

Stupid,' she said. That was the only word for this sense of enormous loss where there had been so very little to lose.

Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn't it? Didn't it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day?

But just then Aneeka shrugged in response and he experienced one of those terrifying moments in which a person you thought you knew reveals a new aspect of their character that has taken hold while you weren't looking.

She gave him precisely the look of disgust he deserved for such a statement, and strode away without another word.

She was the portrait to his father's Dorian Gray – all the anxiety you'd expect him to feel was manifest in her.

shalwar kameez with a thick cardigan that signalled

she was just part of the way he divided up his days, which had structure in place of content.

That's what I want for my life. I want to go to Peshawar... Because there's more past than present there. Two and a half thousand years of history beneath its soil. How long a list of reasons do you need?

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

I'm acting a little crazy, aren't I?" she said. "I'm sorry. Please bear with me. Please." She rested the back of her hand against his cheek, a touch he'd never had from her before

Or even better, jigari dost—a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound.

Don't set yourself apart in the way you dress, the way you think, the outdated codes of behavior you cling to, the ideologies to which you attach your loyalties. Because if you do, you will be treated differently—not because of racism, though that does still exist, but because you insist on your difference from everyone else in this multiethnic, multireligious, multitudinous United Kingdom of ours. And look at all you miss out on because of it.

Some irritations dissipate in a marriage, some accumulate

Still children into their twenties, this generation

I hate the Muslims who make people hate Muslims, he'd replied quietly.

He knew it was a paramount failure of friendship to disappear into a relationship, but to be in his friends' company now felt like stepping back into the aimlessness that had characterized his life before Aneeka came along and became both focus and direction.

But just a few minutes walk away there was a park lined with Banyan trees, their ancient overground roots more enduring than wire rusting in the sea air or guns that jammed with dust or the calculations made today by politicians looking to the next elections.

On remembering that there was no correlation between evil and competence.

enveloping her in the peace that comes from knowing your own powerlessness.