Top 90 Fatima Farheen Mirza Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “How much had been lost? Never made it into her memory, never been captured in a photograph? Hadia closes the hard cover of her book, a snap of sound that reaches her, and she leans back a little as if she has accomplished something great and is now tired. Let this moment make it, she prays, let each of them remember it too.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

52. “Everyone liked Amar. To know him longer was to complicate the adoration one felt for him, the desire to do something that would make life easier for him, and that ache of knowing that there was little that would.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

53. “Next to him, Hadia became more aware of her choices, of what was important for her to keep and what had just been an inherited, unexamined habit.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

54. “The air between them was changed from what he remembered. There had always been tenderness but now there was a charge, too. He was aware of his body and hers alone.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

55. “How unlucky that one person has the power to determine the shape of another person’s life.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

56. “He closed his mouth until he felt the line of his jaw tighten and teeth clench but still the thought escaped him: God, if you’re there, if you’re listening, let Hadia have a happy life, let hers be a fulfilling love. Let him be respectful of her, in awe of her, and tender toward her.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

57. “I did exactly what Hadia’s being celebrated for. No! I did what I thought was so important to you. I chose someone for the community. And I loved her, Mama. I loved her.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

58. “She could not read the look on his face – he hid what he felt from everyone and it had the opposite effect he intended: it only made her care more. Rafiq extended his hand to help her up the stairs. Her children would all leave. But Rafiq would remain a blessing in her life, the center, the constant, the only one who truly bore the weight of this moment the way she did.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

59. “What had she done to her brother, so that she could survive, so that she could be the one who thrived?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

60. “Against her own instincts, her own intuition, because she WANTS to believe him, because she has known him his whole life and cannot fathom a change so drastic he would be made unfamiliar to her.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

61. “Being with Tariq allowed her to stretch herself while also remaining fundamentally herself.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

62. “It didn’t matter if the old way between them was gone and a new way would have to be found; it was a comfort to sit next to him, the kind of comfort only possible between two people who had been in each other’s earliest memories.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

63. “But maybe it would have been all right, maybe it would have eased the space between Layla and Hadia, if once in a while Layla had also shared how she felt about her daughter: that Hadia was beautiful and thoughtful, that she was a natural leader, that she could do anything she put her mind to, that she was smart in a way that pleased Layla but also frightened her, not knowing what life would be like for a woman like her daughter, or if she would know how to help her navigate it.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

64. “Everything he did, I told myself to cherish the act, knowing that the age would pass, and he would stop asking me to carry him everywhere, would stop ranking the ones he loved.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

65. “To be respected you must tame yourself.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

66. “After all, she knows her children: knows their habits and tastes, even as she is becoming increasingly aware that they can easily choose to not speak of their lives. It is they who do not know her, who make no attempt to.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

67. “What was it about an apology that was so difficult? It always felt like it cost something personal and precious. Only now that she was a mother was she so aware of this: the stubbornness and pride that came with being human, the desire to be loyal and generous that came too, each impulse at odds with the other.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

68. “First the rituals went, and were replaced by guilt. And then the guilt went, and soon his belief faltered, before vanishing almost entirely, too. Belief in hellfire, and the narrow bridge one had to cross to reach Heaven, thin as a hair, sharp as the blade of a knife.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

69. “And because her home was given to arguments, in the way she imagined other homes might be given to laughter.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

70. “If ever they could resume, even just for an afternoon. If ever she called. A sin was not a sin, if it were for her. A risk was not a risk.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

71. “It is not that we thought our way was better. It was that we did not know another way.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

72. “How were they to know the moments that would define them?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

73. “Maybe it had always been out of our hands. Maybe anything we could have wanted to instill in them was, at best, a hope.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

74. “How were they to know the moments that would define them? It will affect his personality for his whole life, someone is saying to her, and whose fault will it be then?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

75. “The one person in front of whom he could sin under the watch of their fathers’ God without being cast aside.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

76. “Please, she is saying, say something, I don’t have much time. But there is nothing he can think to say, and it occurs to him that it is the one who loves less who has the privilege of being able to express their feelings easily and at all.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

77. “Loving Amira was not just loving a young woman. It was loving a whole world. She was of the same world he had been born into but had only ever felt himself outside of, and sitting by her was the closest he came to feeling harmony with his own home.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

78. “Baba, what he is gambling on is not just his standing before God. This is much graver. This is about him surviving this life, here.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

79. “It was a strange time in their lives: the children like paper boats they were releasing into the water and watching float away.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

80. “I let my anger get too carried away, I told myself, I should have stopped before I did what I did. Anger was my worst attribute. It was as if I left myself when it shot up in me, and by the time I was rid of it I had already done the damage. And even thought I could justify why I had reacted the way I had, I always regretted my particular action.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

81. “Like water they could return to any shape asked of them.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

82. “Where did they come from, her children? And how did they arrive already themselves, and unlike anyone else?”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

83. “This night, he knows, will be a mark that divides his life.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

84. “She could not say she had kept his secrets when it would have been better for him if she had told them, or that she had given away the ones she should have guarded.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

85. “He had left the path. His parents had given him a map, and directions, and he had abandoned it all. Now his heart was so ink-dark he could be lost and not know it, and not care, and never know how to find his way back.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

86. “Theirs was a love that acknowledged the individual as separate from the whole, from the family as a unit.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

87. “Her hands shook as she reached into her purse. Gently, so as not to tear the wrapping, she tugged at the tape. She drew her breath in so sharply it startled her. It was her watch. Her Baba’s watch, her Dada’s watch.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

88. “I hated the clamoring of people before. Now it is silence that unsettles me.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

89. “And how miraculous it is to me that we receive in this world the very things we need from it, how tonight it is another stranger who has stepped forward to play that same part, help me get through this night until morning.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza

90. “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.”

— Fatima Farheen Mirza