Kamila Shamsie, Kartography
17 quotes
"I'll fall.''You wont fall.''I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.'As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. 'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me."
"This world is out of date"
"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."
"They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that's not true-' He took a deep breath. 'You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us."
"If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower."
"You have this ability to find beauty in weird places."
"I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun."
"I still hear the world spinning."
"Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this."
"Bijli fails in the dead of night / Won’t help to call “I need a light” / You’re in Karachi now / Oh, oh you’re in Karachi now. / Night is falling and you just cant see / Is this illusion or KESC / You’re in Karachi now"
"Can angels lie spine to spine?If not, how they must envy us humans"
"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."
"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."
"If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you."
"How do you eat your roots?"
"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?"
"All around us, Karachi kept moving"