“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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“In a universe, on a continent, in a country, in a state, in a county, on a river, in a small yellow boat,' I said. 'That's what Mary used to say to explain the odds of us meeting. And you have to be born in roughly the same period. Those are the odds. And probably you need to speak the same language.'-- Cobb”
― Joseph Monninger, quote from Eternal on the Water
“Most people live their lives as if the end were always years away. They measure their days in love, laughter, accomplishment, and loss. There are moments of sunshine and storm. There are schedules, phone calls, careers, anxieties, joys, exotic trips, favorite foods, romance, shame, and hunger. A person can be defined by clothing, the smell of his breath, the way she combs her hair, the shape of his torso, or even the company she keeps.”
― Bill O'Reilly, quote from Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
“But the bigots always see those whom they hate as morally corrupt, as if they confuse their own aesthetics of disgust and fear with actual ethical critique, rationalizing their emotional response, and enforcing their moral certainties with passion, establishing them-selves, subtly or brutally, as arbiters of reason.”
― Hal Duncan, quote from Vellum
“As long as I'm between home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime. But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way. ”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood
“The first thing she noticed were the lightbulbs in the ceiling.
She wondered where the spindlers had gotten them, and where the wires for the electricity ran to, and pictured some poor family Above whose bills were always too high at the end of the month, and the father who would yell at the children about where all that power went - when really, of course, it was the spindlers that were the whole problem.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from The Spindlers
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Dead Is the New Blac...BookQuoters 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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