Quotes from Kamila Shamsie

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un—We surely belong to Allah and to him we return.

I meant, it must be difficult to be Muslim in the world these days." "I'd find it more difficult to not be Muslim,

We saw something was happening, my sister and I. We thought it was some kind of secret affair, his first time in love. In a way, it was. What else explains a person being turned inside out in the space of just a few weeks?

Well, you obviously don't love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.

By contrast, whatever happened to Maryam today wouldn't matter very much. She'd still inherit a business and a place in society. The rich lived in a different universe.

You think you can compare your disgraceful demands to the terrible decisions I have to make for the good of the company and this family?

Who made love a heart without arteries and chambers—a castrated organ?

For girls, becoming women was inevitability, for boys, becoming men was ambition.

He put his arm around me. That was all. He put his arm around me and we didn't say a word.

In almost all human history, figures descending from the sky would have been angels or gods or demons -- or Icarus hurtling down, his father, Daedalus, following too slowly to catch the vainglorious boy. What must it have felt like to inhabit a commonality of human experience -- all eyes to the sky, watching for some mythic to land?

The heart of tradition, everyone agreed, but few understood Britain as well as Karamat Lone did and knew that within the deepest chamber of that heart of tradition was the engine of radical change.

awful freedom of someone with no one to answer to.

Isma stayed on the line, listening to their breath rise and fall together as in all those times when Aneeka would crawl into Isma's bed, awakened from or into some night terror, and only the older sister's heartbeat could teach the younger one's frantic heart how to quiet, until there was no sound except their breath in unison, the universe still around them.

She learned more about this part of the world from his retelling than from her own living

she was filled with the satisfaction of being with a group of people and knowing the words and tone that would produce exactly the effect you wanted. This was what was meant by belonging and home, words she understood in the

You can read this diagonal script, can't you? Any man could. It says, "Stay away. This isn't what you want.

Men know nothing of inevitable pain.

To look at waves and understand that when they break they start to re-form.

Lucky,' Zahra said, and Maryam grinned. She liked nothing better than to be compared to Lucky Santangelo, heroine of the Jackie Collins novels, composed in equal parts of courage, ruthlessness and loyalty.

But for Maryam, university was just an interruption before she could take over the family business. The only future that mattered to her was the one that would unfold in Karachi, a city to which Zahra had no intention of returning once she'd left it.

Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question "What do these people have to do with us?" and "What are we doing out there in the world?

only the fat from their bodies sticking to the walls and rocks around them like shadows.

Days – no, weeks – after the bomb and everything still smelt of burning.

Your father doesn't see any of this. Little princeling wants a crown on his head and his hands lily-white. He can't have both. Why do you have to be