The voices / 35 fragments

Kamila Shamsie

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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01Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

02Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote

03Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote

04Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

05Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

06Undated

This world is out of date

Kamila Shamsie / quote

07Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

08Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

09Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote

10Undated

When the war's over, I'll be kind.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

11Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

12Undated

You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

13Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

14Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote

15Undated

I still hear the world spinning.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

16Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote

17Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote

18Undated

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?

Kamila Shamsie / quote

19Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote

20Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

21Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote

22Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

23Undated

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.

Kamila Shamsie / quote

24Undated

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

Kamila Shamsie / quote