Quotes by Kamila Shamsie

Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone elses hand stray to your plate of food.I replied: no, thats just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone elses 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 theyll find a way back to you, and maybe youll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything thats still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.

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

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

Ill fall.You wont fall.Ill fall. Ill fall and Ill 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, Youd never do that to me.

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

This world is out of date

We never actually have serious conversations about anything for more than 20 seconds. So there’s a beautiful superficiality to our relationship which sometimes gets covered up by all the genuine affection flowing back and forth.

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

If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.

When the wars over, Ill be kind.

If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream hes always known to be a dream, then hes among the fortunate ones.

You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.

I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.

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

I still hear the world spinning.

So she became a woman who held her head high, not in arrogance, or contempt, but because she knew that it was a form of cowardice to make a choice and then pretend you didn’t really make it

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

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?

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

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.