Top 80 Kamila Shamsie Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.”

— Kamila Shamsie

52. “Who made love a heart without arteries and chambers – a castrated organ?”

— Kamila Shamsie

53. “We never actually have serious conversations about anything for more than 20 seconds. So there’s a beautiful superficiality to our relationship which sometimes gets covered up by all the genuine affection flowing back and forth.”

— Kamila Shamsie

54. “He put his arm around me. That was all. He put his arm around me and we didn’t say a word.”

— Kamila Shamsie

55. “Grief never leaves, It merely sinks into you.”

— Kamila Shamsie

56. “If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.”

— Kamila Shamsie

57. “Character is just an invention, but it’s an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. – Broken Verses.”

— Kamila Shamsie

58. “Contempt, disdain, scorn: these emotions were stops along a closed loop that originated and terminated in a sense of superiority.”

— Kamila Shamsie

59. “All the wrong choices he made, they were necessary to get him to the right place, the place he is now.”

— Kamila Shamsie

60. “Who among us has never been moved to tears, or to tears’ invisible counterparts, by mention of the word ‘home’? Is there any other word that can feel so heavy as you hold it in your mouth?”

— Kamila Shamsie

61. “You don’t mind the exclusivity, you just mind that you aren’t part of it, Layla had said once, as if this was a Maryam-specific attitude rather than absolutely everyone’s objection to exclusivity.”

— Kamila Shamsie

62. “Or even better, jigari dost – a friendship so deep it was lodged within you, could not be cut out without leaving a profound, perhaps fatal, wound.”

— Kamila Shamsie

63. “I’m acting a little crazy, aren’t I?” she said. “I’m sorry. Please bear with me. Please.” She rested the back of her hand against his cheek, a touch he’d never had from her before.”

— Kamila Shamsie

64. “Aneeka must learn to think of him as lost forever. It was possible to do this with someone you loved, Isma had learned that early on. But you could learn it only if there was a complete vacuum where the other person had been.”

— Kamila Shamsie

65. “The heart of tradition, everyone agreed, but few understood Britain as well as Karamat Lone did and knew that within the deepest chamber of that heart of tradition was the engine of radical change.”

— Kamila Shamsie

66. “We saw something was happening, my sister and I. We thought it was some kind of secret affair, his first time in love. In a way, it was. What else explains a person being turned inside out in the space of just a few weeks?”

— Kamila Shamsie

67. “In almost all human history, figures descending from the sky would have been angels or gods or demons – or Icarus hurtling down, his father, Daedalus, following too slowly to catch the vainglorious boy. What must it have felt like to inhabit a commonality of human experience – all eyes to the sky, watching for some mythic to land?”

— Kamila Shamsie

68. “She gave him precisely the look of disgust he deserved for such a statement, and strode away without another word.”

— Kamila Shamsie

69. “She was the portrait to his father’s Dorian Gray – all the anxiety you’d expect him to feel was manifest in her.”

— Kamila Shamsie

70. “He knew it was a paramount failure of friendship to disappear into a relationship, but to be in his friends’ company now felt like stepping back into the aimlessness that had characterized his life before Aneeka came along and became both focus and direction.”

— Kamila Shamsie

71. “But just then Aneeka shrugged in response and he experienced one of those terrifying moments in which a person you thought you knew reveals a new aspect of their character that has taken hold while you weren’t looking.”

— Kamila Shamsie

72. “You think marriage is in the large things, Mrs. Rahimi had once said. It’s in the small things. Can you survive the arguments about housework, can you learn to live with each other’s different TV viewing habits.”

— Kamila Shamsie

73. “She felt, as she did most mornings, the deep pleasure of daily life distilled to the essentials: books, walks, spaces in which to think and work.”

— Kamila Shamsie

74. “She learned more about this part of the world from his retelling than from her own living.”

— Kamila Shamsie

75. “But just a few minutes walk away there was a park lined with Banyan trees, their ancient overground roots more enduring than wire rusting in the sea air or guns that jammed with dust or the calculations made today by politicians looking to the next elections.”

— Kamila Shamsie

76. “Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn’t it? Didn’t it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day?”

— Kamila Shamsie

77. “Well, you obviously don’t love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.”

— Kamila Shamsie

78. “Some irritations dissipate in a marriage, some accumulate.”

— Kamila Shamsie

79. “Still children into their twenties, this generation.”

— Kamila Shamsie

80. “On remembering that there was no correlation between evil and competence.”

— Kamila Shamsie

81. “Isma stayed on the line, listening to their breath rise and fall together as in all those times when Aneeka would crawl into Isma’s bed, awakened from or into some night terror, and only the older sister’s heartbeat could teach the younger one’s frantic heart how to quiet, until there was no sound except their breath in unison, the universe still around them.”

— Kamila Shamsie

82. “By contrast, whatever happened to Maryam today wouldn’t matter very much. She’d still inherit a business and a place in society. The rich lived in a different universe.”

— Kamila Shamsie

83. “You think you can compare your disgraceful demands to the terrible decisions I have to make for the good of the company and this family?”

— Kamila Shamsie