Top 90 Fatima Farheen Mirza Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “But I did fight. I tried to leave every human I have interacted with better than or the same as when I encountered them... It was the way I wanted to move through the world... That was my fight: to continue to do little things for people around me, so no one would find fault in my demeanor and misattribute it to my religion.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

2. “And it is in these moments that the fabric of my life reveals itself to be an illusion: thinking that I am fine, we all are, that we could grow around your loss like a tree that bends around a barrier or wound. That I do not need to see you again. That the reality of our life as it is now is the best that we could have done and the best we could have hoped for.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

3. “There is no such thing as friends, only family, and only family will never desert you.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

4. “Afsoos was the word in Urdu. There was no equivalent in English. It was a specific kind of regret – not wishing he had acted differently, but a helpless sadness at the situation as it was, a sense that it could not have been another way.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

5. “Girls are not like boys, they are told, girls have control over their desires. It is up to the girls to do what they can to protect the boys from sin.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

6. “Of all my mistakes the greatest, the most dangerous, was not emphasising the mercy of God. Every verse of the Quran begins by reminding us of God’s mercy, I tried to tell you that night, and you nodded, but how can I know what you heard or what you would remember.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

7. “The first sound we want our children to hear is the voice of their father, telling the child where it has come from, who its creator is, and whose care it will be in now. Telling the child, there is no God but God, and God is Great.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

8. “Why do things always sound sadder in Urdu? Prettier too. She likes that they speak to each other in Urdu, how even speaking it feels like access to their secret world, a world where they feel like different people, capable of feelings she could not experience let alone speak of in English. She turns around and faces him. He looks worried and scratches his cheek. He is only six. First grade has just begun and he has had a hard time adjusting to the longer hours.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

9. “But Imam Ali said two things: first, that we must imagine for one another seventy excuses before landing on a single judgment, and also, on that night, he told his companions to refrain from condemning a man, even as he staggered by showing proof of his sin, because they could not know if he would repent when alone, or fathom what existed in his heart.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

10. “She pictured a dark sky with the fog in front of it, how her mother had once explained it to her: we don’t have to see past the fog to know there are stars.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

11. “For his beloved grandson, out of his love for him, even the Prophet of Islam could pause the single most important requirement of faith, regardless of how many watched.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

12. “I will wait by the gate until I see your face. I have waited a decade, haven’t I, in this limited life? Waiting in the endless one would be no sacrifice. And Inshallah one day, I know I will see you approaching. You will look just as you did at twenty, that year you first left us, and I will also be as I was in my youth. We will look like brothers on that day. We will walk together, as equals.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

13. “Sometimes, even now, I wonder if you realized that the world loved you, softened at your presence.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

14. “And nothing compares to the promise of stepping into a classroom knowing she will step out a different person. That she could learn something that would change the way she saw the whole world, and her place in it. There is even the private hope that if she does work as hard as she absolutely can, there is a chance she will be able to sway the outcome of her life, and maybe one day a door will be presented to her, and an opportunity to walk through it.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

15. “Hadia looks up where she imagines God is, sometimes a spot on the ceiling, other times a patch of brilliant blue in the sky, to thank Him for the moment passed unseen.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

16. “As Amar watched the hall fill with guests arriving for his sister’s wedding, he promised himself he would stay.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

17. “About how important it was for one to choose the right friends, that it was one’s friends who were the truest reflection of the self.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

18. “And nothing compares to the promise of stepping into a classroom knowing she will step out a different person. That she could learn something that would change the way she saw the whole world, and her place in it.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

19. “She had tried, hadn’t she? She had tried her best. Her intentions were good, were they not? It was hardly a comfort now. Intentions shrank next to actions. Actions took on their own momentum.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

20. “Amar, I know this will mean nothing to you now. But I do believe that even your father’s God, even He, would forgive you. To know you is to want to let you in.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

21. “She stopped reading, holding back tears and unable to continue without having to bite her knuckle – was it because of his words or because of this stranger, this young man, who was kind enough to look closely at her son, and see what she had seen?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

22. “But what he felt for Amira – it was as though she had been tucked in a compartment in his heart that hadn’t changed, and seeing her now he knew it never would: he could return to her at any age and feel for her the way he always had. He knew, with such certainty it shamed him, that it would not matter if he fell in love one day and married – Amira would continue to exist as a love entirely apart.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

23. “That it feels unexpectedly comforting is, in and of itself, difficult.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

24. “Mumma would always tell them to be completely silent during the nikkah, to put all their energy into prayer, that it was a holy time when something unseen in the universe was torn open and angels descended to bear witness to the momentous occasion.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

25. “For a moment, Layla glanced at Amar’s journals, but she could barely make sense of his handwriting. Each deciphered sentence threatened to unravel her understanding of him and carried with it the threat of more secrets. It did not matter that she was his mother. What she could ever hope to know of him was just a glimpse – like the beam of a lighthouse skipping out, only one stretch of waves visible at a time, the rest left in the unknowable dark.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

26. “And who will be the one to step forward first, grab a fistful of dirt, and before they have dropped it into my grave say to me, you are not going alone to the other world, we are here, I am here, sending you off.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

27. “Hadia looks to the ceiling and sends a quick, short prayer to God, “please, do not let him grow taller than me just yet.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

28. “After you ran away I began to sleep with the window open, she wanted to say to him. Even now, when it rains, I hesitate for a moment before shutting it. But there was no time. Amar stepped from the stage.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

29. “Her reflection. Her tired face. She touches her dry bottom lip and thinks of how odd it is to experience a secret loss. A loss without a name. The loss of a potential version of her life. Of what she never had, and now never will.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

30. “You said to me, Baba, what if we were meant to look closer? You called me Baba that night. I’ve looked closer, Amar, I have looked, and I have looked again, and I have exhausted myself looking. For his beloved grandson, out of his love for him, even the Prophet of Islam could pause the single most important requirement of faith, regardless of how many watched. What were we meant to learn from this that we had failed to?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

31. “Don’t make the mistake of confusing a sad state with an interesting life.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

32. “Maybe it was the exceptions we made for one another that brought God more pride than when we stood firm, maybe His heart opened when His creations opened their hearts to one another, and maybe that is why the boy was switched with the ram: so a father would not have to choose between his boy and his belief. There was another way. Amar was sure of it. He wanted them to find it together.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

33. “She thinks of how they are told that God wants to help His creations, how He says: take one step toward me and I will take ten steps toward you. She is only human, but still, if her brother would only speak to her, be honest with her, she would step a hundred times toward him. He studies her for a long time.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

34. “Layla shuts her eyes, not wanting him to to see her looking at him. What is it about caring for another, feeling love, feeling affection, at times desire, that makes one shy? Even in front of her own husband she feels that hesitation of expression.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

35. “Her voice is so sad that makes him want to touch her, It seems wholly unbelievable that they are not allowed to touch one another, that he cannot even offer an embrace to comfort her. How could something so simple, for the solace in a time like this, be a sin?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

36. “This must be how she is when she is excited, and sure enough she tells him she loves it, with such generosity of expression that it takes him by surprise, that someone could be capable of being moved, in that way, by something so small.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

37. “I panicked, not knowing what my children were capable of, having been made aware suddenly that the limit of their behavior was nothing my greatest fears could even conjure... Maybe anything we could have wanted to instill in them was, at best, a hope.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

38. “The trees above them are blossoming with white flowers. The sky glimpsed through the branches so blue. How can he not notice as they pass beneath them? When God first began to brainstorm the world did He think to make branches a dark brown and flowers either white or soft pink, and only like that in the spring, so that you are always startled by their bloom? Or were God’s decisions scattered and sudden, beautiful by chance?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

39. “Her reflection. Her tired face. She touches her dry bottom lip and thinks of how odd it is to experience a secret loss. A loss without a name. The loss of a potential version of her life. Of what she never had, and now never will. The realization that, in her own small and sustained way, she had loved someone for years that she had only looked at in glimpses, only spoken to in passing, only thought of in secret, only ever touched when they passed a cup of lassi or a stick of gum between them.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

40. “Her wedding was both a celebration of the life she was about to embark upon and a night to mark the departure from her old life at home.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

41. “We were one unit composed of a hundred, all of us moving and trying to think only of God. My lips moved. I was among brothers, I was home.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

42. “They didn’t care how she was affected. Maybe children could never imagine their mother as being anyone other than their mother.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

43. “She has become the one to whom he confesses the fights with his father, the fights that make him want to leave, to forget that he ever came from this family, and she quiets his anger with a brief touch of her hand on his arm. She tries to tell him that what he feels is not all anger, that one day that anger will burn out and he will be left with what he can’t see right now: a sadness, an ache.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

44. “And if what we have been taught is true, I will not enter without you. I will wait by the gate until I see your face.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

45. “Just one more moment. Just give us one more. But maybe her heart would never be satisfied; maybe it was ever-enlarging in its want for me. Because she knew that if she were granted one more moment, then another one was what she would ask for. She could live around her son for a hundred years and even then, when it was time to part, she would think – but it has been too brief.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

46. “We pray together and when it is time for us to ask for what our hearts desire, my first wish is that he remain steadfast in faith, and then if he does not, that he never believe that God is a being with a heart like a human’s, capable of being small and vindictive.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

47. “A hundred times. If not more. She was stunned and stunned again by them, and her love for them. How much had been lost? Never made it into her memory, never been captured in a photograph?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

48. “Be careful who you point your blame at, Layla. And remember that anytime you point your finger to accuse someone, there are three fingers beneath it, curled to point right back at you.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

49. “She could hold in her heart a belief in Islam as well as the unwavering belief that every human had the right to choose who they loved, and how, and that belief was in exact accordance with her faith: that it is the individual’s right to choose, and the individual’s duty to empathize with one another. Didn’t the Quran itself contain the verse, We have created you from many tribes, so that you may know one another.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

50. “There are people, my friends even, who say maybe there is no soul. Maybe there is no creator. My own son once said as much to me. But I have looked up at this sky since I was a child and I have always been stirred, in the most secret depth of me that I alone cannot access, and if that is not my soul awakening to the majesty of my creator then what is it?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza