“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 from Broken Verses
“Can 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 Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“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.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“The next day it's Virginia Woolf who wafts through. Hers is a
curiously insistent presence; take your eyes off her for a moment and
the next thing you know she's rearranging your syntax as though it
were cutlery improperly laid out for a seven-course meal with some
foreign dignitary who disdains your nation's table manners.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“At what point does character-playing become habit, something for which we are grateful because it allows us to go through the world with the ease that comes from being predictable to ourselves, even if that predictability takes the form of neurosis, hysteria, depression? And at what point does that habit turn darkly into addiction? I wiped my hands clean. We are so desperate to be explicable to ourselves, to rely on ourselves, that we need to believe a certain version of who we are even when evidence starts to mount that the version is a lie, even when the part of us which is not tamed by habit strains to break free and overwhelm the tired, repetitive creature that our character has become, mouldering at the edges.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“I think Shehnaz was right. In the end it wasn’t about the Poet, or me or anyone. It was about a minute, five minutes, ten minutes in which she believed, with utter certainty, that she simply could not endure any more.’ It seemed impossible, already, to have denied this truth for so long.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“I will not be in here for ever, I promise. All metaphors need to come up for air. When I can bear no more of separation, when I have learnt all that absence can teach me of desire, the walls will shimmer and I will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“In his prison poems, the bars on his windows are merely the grid through which he sees shooting stars, each lash of a whip is a reminder of the insecurity of tyrants, and a rumour that orders for his execution have been dispatched is reason to weep for the executioner.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“Your mother and I had one conversation a little before she died. She was sitting in the garden one evening when I came home from work, and she said, “I have to confess something. When we played ‘chicken’ from KDA to Clifton and I said I made you run three red lights, I lied. I made you stop even when they were only just turning amber.” And I replied, “Samina, I didn’t love you because you were the girl who ran red lights. I loved you because when you covered my eyes with your hands, I knew I could trust you to get me home.” She was afraid of running red lights, Aasmaani. She wasn’t an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
“It’s true, that in concrete battles the tyrants may have the upper hand in terms of tactics, weapons, ruthlessness. What our means of protest attempt to do is to move the battles towards abstract space. Force tyranny to defend itself in language. Weaken it with public opinion, with supreme court judgements, with debates and subversive curriculum. Take hold of the media, take hold of the printing presses and the newspapers, broadcast your views from pirate radio channels, spread the word. Don’t do anything less than all you are capable of, and remember that history outlives you. It may not be until your grandchildren’s days that they’ll point back and say, there were sown the seeds of what we’ve now achieved.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Broken Verses
Kamila Shamsie
Born place: in Karachi, Pakistan
Born date August 13, 1973
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“Paul D did not answer because she didn't expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon - everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew that their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without fox would laugh at them. And these "men" who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Glass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother - a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire - well now, THAT was freedom.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Beloved
“And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. . . . And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.”
― Michael Crichton, quote from Jurassic Park
“The people I see from my window. In the huts, in the distance. They're all dressed the same.' 'Ah, those people,' said Father, nodding his head and smiling slightly. 'Those people...well, they're not people at all, Bruno.' Bruno frowned. 'They're not?' he asked, unsure what Father meant by that.”
― John Boyne, quote from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
“But Sauron was not of mortal flesh, and though he was robbed now of that shape in which had wrought so great an evil, so that he could never again appear fair to the eyes of Men, yet his spirit arose out of the deep and passed as a shadow and a black wind over the sea, and came back to Middle-earth and to Mordor that was his home. There he took up again his great Ring in Barad-dur, and dwelt there, dark and silent, until he wrought himself a new guise, an image of malice and hatred made visible; and the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, quote from The Silmarillion
“The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Cat's Cradle
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Animal Farm / 1984BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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