Kamila Shamsie

“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?”

“This world is out of date”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.”

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

“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.”

“Can angels lie spine to spine?If not, how they must envy us humans”

“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.”

“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”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“There’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.”

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

“How do you eat your roots?”

“If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he's always known to be a dream, then he's among the fortunate ones.”

“Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.”