Top 80 Kamila Shamsie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Love is like an eternal flame, once it is lit, it will continue to burn for all time.”

— Kamila Shamsie

2. “You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.”

— Kamila Shamsie

3. “Decisions. Where, what, why. Can’t handle them. So I’m prolonging the indecision with higher education.”

— Kamila Shamsie

4. “When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? – Broken Verses.”

— Kamila Shamsie

Featured in: Romance Quotes

5. “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

6. “Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish – both names that you can find more than once on our family tree.”

— Kamila Shamsie

7. “How do you eat your roots?”

— Kamila Shamsie

8. “How horrifying that morning when you wake up and your first thought is not of the person who has left. That’s when you know, I will never die of a broken heart.”

— Kamila Shamsie

9. “Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same.”

— Kamila Shamsie

10. “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

11. “Is love stronger when it let’s go or when it holds on?”

— Kamila Shamsie

12. “By the time the first light appeared in the sky she felt herself transformed by the desire to be known, completely.”

— Kamila Shamsie

13. “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

14. “We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.”

— Kamila Shamsie

15. “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

16. “Grief was the deal God struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overheard, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them to never turn around.”

— Kamila Shamsie

17. “Laughing, he said, “Cancer or Islam – which is the greater affliction?”

— Kamila Shamsie

18. “For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?”

— Kamila Shamsie

19. “For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.”

— Kamila Shamsie

20. “What would you stop at to help the people you love most? Well, you obviously don’t love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.”

— Kamila Shamsie

21. “Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.”

— Kamila Shamsie

22. “So many things you promise yourself you won’t get used to, and then you do.”

— Kamila Shamsie

23. “A man needed fire in his veins to burn through the world, not ice to freeze everything in place.”

— Kamila Shamsie

24. “There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.”

— Kamila Shamsie

25. “Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.”

— Kamila Shamsie

26. “Don’t, please, don’t disappear.”

— Kamila Shamsie

27. “Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.”

— Kamila Shamsie

28. “Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make anything less valuable.”

— Kamila Shamsie

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Difficult but worth it – that’s how my mother had once describe life with Omi.”

— Kamila Shamsie

32. “I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.”

— Kamila Shamsie

33. “The truths we conceal don’t disappear Raheen, they appear in different forms.”

— Kamila Shamsie

34. “If I wasn’t me, you wouldn’t be you.”

— Kamila Shamsie

35. “I still hear the world spinning.”

— Kamila Shamsie

36. “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

37. “This world is out of date.”

— Kamila Shamsie

38. “I hate the Muslims who make people hate Muslims, he’d replied quietly.”

— Kamila Shamsie

39. “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

40. “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

41. “This is the worst of our ways of remembering – this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism.”

— Kamila Shamsie

42. “When the war’s over, I’ll be kind.”

— Kamila Shamsie

43. “The volume was off, allowing for some pleasing moments of synchresis, such as when the dogs were released from their cages just as the front door was hurled open by a drunk, or when the strip light overhead started to buzz and the on-field umpire batted midges away from his face.”

— Kamila Shamsie

44. “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

45. “My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn’ as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark. – Broken Verses.”

— Kamila Shamsie

Featured in: Romance Quotes

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “The world won’t get more or less terrible if we’re indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.”

— Kamila Shamsie

50. “Those Genes Could Have Been Mine.”

— Kamila Shamsie