Kamila Shamsie

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.

Why have the English remained to English? Throughout India's history conquerors have come from elsewhere, and all of them --- Turk, Arab, Hun, Mongol, Persian --- have become Indian. If --- when ---this Pakistan happens, those Muslims who leave Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad to go there, They will be leaving their homes. But when the English leave, they'll be going home.

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?

The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.

Character is just an invention, but it's an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. - Broken Verses

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.

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

All around us, Karachi kept moving

Abdullah to Kim Burton: "War is like disease. Until you've had it, you don't know it. But no. That's a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold that stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war - countries (America) like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. Tt's why you fight wars more than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn__ make anything less valuable.

How do you eat your roots?

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

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