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?
Kamila ShamsieThey 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.
Kamila ShamsieThere 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.
Kamila ShamsieCan I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow.
Kamila ShamsieDon't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? You were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to me when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my cultural references were the sign of a colonized mind.
Kamila ShamsieFor 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?
Kamila ShamsieBijli 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
Kamila ShamsieWhy do you have to be so annoying sometimes?" "Cant help it. It's the company I keep.
Kamila ShamsieNo self-respecting feminist could argue with the claim that the novel is more likely to accept existing power structures than not. But there's a vast difference, surely, between Dickens saying Indians should be exterminated and a Dave Eggers writing eloquently about the NSA, but not being as outspoken on American military power abroad.
Kamila ShamsiePride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish - both names that you can find more than once on our family tree.
Kamila ShamsieThere’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.
Kamila ShamsieHow 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.
Kamila ShamsieHow 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.
Kamila ShamsieDecisions. Where, what, why. Can't handle them. So I'm prolonging the indecision with higher education.
Kamila ShamsieThe 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.
Kamila ShamsieWe 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.
Kamila ShamsieLove is like an eternal flame, once it is lit, it will continue to burn for all time.
Kamila ShamsieHer 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.
Kamila Shamsie