Kamila Shamsie quotes:

Those Genes Could Have Been Mine

Pride! 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.

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.

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

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.

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."

How do you eat your roots?

Don'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.

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.

I still hear the world spinning.

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

Love is like an eternal flame, once it is lit, it will continue to burn for all time.

Decisions. Where, what, why. Can't handle them. So I'm prolonging the indecision with higher education.

You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

Is love stronger when it let's go or when it holds on?

So many things you promise yourself you won't get used to, and then you do.

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?

The truths we conceal don't disappear Raheen, they appear in different forms

This world is out of date

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.

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

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