Kamila Shamsie

“You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.”

“How do you eat your roots?”

“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”

“We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.”

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

“بالنسبة الي هيروكو، أن تعرف يعني أن تُريد”

“They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.”

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

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

“Don't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? Youwere Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc tome when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my culturalreferences were the sign of a colonized mind.”

“The next day it's Virginia Woolf who wafts through. Hers is acuriously insistent presence; take your eyes off her for a moment andthe next thing you know she's rearranging your syntax as though itwere cutlery improperly laid out for a seven-course meal with someforeign dignitary who disdains your nation's table manners.”

“Can I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questionsin the world, that is the one which irritates me most with itssimultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is aboutto follow.”

“Sitting on the divan, she touched a finger to the bullet wound in his chest. It seemed so small, so incapable of creating the exodus of blood which had drenched his clothes and skin as he lay in the hospital, waiting for her to claim him. Death has been instantaneous, they said, as if there were a relief in that. She did not want death to have been instantaneous; she wanted to have at least held his hand as he lay dying and said goodbye to him in terms other than the, ‘Why are you doing again? You’ll find nothing. Stay. Oh all right, go,’ that had been her farewell to him that morning. Stay. Stay. Stay. She should have repeated it like a madwoman, banged her head against the wall in a frenzy, hit him and wept. She should have said it just one more time, just a little more forcefully. She should have taken his dear, sweet head in her hands and kissed his eyes and forehead. Stay.”

“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.”

“How horrifying that morning when you wake up and your first thought is not of the person who has left. That’s when you know, I will never die of a broken heart.”

“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.”

“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. ”

“Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same.”

“I'll fall.''You wont fall.''I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. 'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.”

“Those Genes Could Have Been Mine”

“Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?""Cant help it. It's the company I keep.”

“For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?”

“I still hear the world spinning.”

“This world is out of date”

“Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food.I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.”

“If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.”

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

“When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? - Broken Verses”

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

“How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.”

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

“There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.”

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