“So many things you promise yourself you won't get used to, and then you do.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“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.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“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 from Burnt Shadows
“The world won’t get more or less terrible if we’re indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate,’ Kim said. ‘Though it’s possible it will seem slightly less terrible if there are marshmallows in the hot chocolate.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“Why didn’t you stay?’ she has whispered against the unyielding stone. Why didn’t you stay? She pressed the berry against her lips. Why didn’t I ask you just one more time to stay.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“....barriers made of metal could turn fluid when touched simultaneously by people on either side...”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“Sitting on the divan, she touched a finger to the bullet wound in his chest. It seemed so small, so incapable of creating the exodus of blood which had drenched his clothes and skin as he lay in the hospital, waiting for her to claim him. Death has been instantaneous, they said, as if there were a relief in that. She did not want death to have been instantaneous; she wanted to have at least held his hand as he lay dying and said goodbye to him in terms other than the, ‘Why are you doing again? You’ll find nothing. Stay. Oh all right, go,’ that had been her farewell to him that morning.
Stay. Stay. Stay. She should have repeated it like a madwoman, banged her head against the wall in a frenzy, hit him and wept. She should have said it just one more time, just a little more forcefully. She should have taken his dear, sweet head in her hands and kissed his eyes and forehead. Stay.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“بالنسبة الي هيروكو، أن تعرف يعني أن تُريد”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“When the war's over, I'll be kind.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“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.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“Why didn’t you stay?” she had whispered against the unyielding stone. Why didn’t you stay? She pressed the berry against her lips. Why didn’t I ask you just one more time to stay? Sajjad stood up quietly and walked over to her. “There is a phrase I have heard in English: to leave someone alone with their grief. Urdu has no equivalent phrase. It only understands the concept of gathering around and becoming ‘ghum-khaur’—grief-eaters—who take in the mourner’s sorrow.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“The world won't get more or less terrible if we're indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make anything less valuable.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“I’ll read to you,” Elizabeth said. “Any preferences?” “Evelyn Waugh.” “Really? How strange.” “That’s what Konrad said. He said Waugh is for readers who know the English and understand what’s being satirised. And I told him that maybe the books are better when you don’t know it’s satire and just think it’s comedy.” Elizabeth considered this. “You’re probably right. I find him much too cruel. And almost unbearably sad.” Hiroko’s”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this, and with just a tiny bit of luck so will everyone you love.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“Ghum-khaur: devorador-de-mágoas, aquele que absorve o desgosto do enlutado.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“Kun ihminen on yhdeksänkymmentäyksi, parasta mitä uskaltaa toivoa on se, että olisi hyvin säilynyt. Mikä tarkoittaa, että näyttää säilykkeeltä.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“...and i will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
“Konrad had been right to say barriers were made of metal that could turn fluid when touched simultaneously by people on either side.”
― Kamila Shamsie, quote from Burnt Shadows
Kamila Shamsie
Born place: in Karachi, Pakistan
Born date August 13, 1973
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“Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us.
Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on”
― Homer, quote from The Iliad of Homer
“Why is it that the people you care about the most end up making you feel so meaningless?”
― quote from You’re the Password to My Life
“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
“if fallacious reasoning always led to absurd conclusions, it would be found out at once and corrected. But once an easy, shortcut mode of reasoning has led to a few correct results, almost everybody accepts it; those who try to warn against it are not listened to.”
― E.T. Jaynes, quote from Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
“There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship. But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Grand Inquisitor
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