Kartography Quotes

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food.
I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?"
"Cant help it. It's the company I keep.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Is love stronger when it let's go or when it holds on?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“… and that’s why they leave, isn’t it? Because they have to see themselves in the context of something larger than just the two of them. It’s like that Faiz poem, you know, mujh say pehli si muhabat, when you’ve seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can’t go on pretending none of it matters, you can’t pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world. And that two of them, when they come back to the city, that’s when they find out that their love was imperfect because it couldn’t bear the knowledge of everything that lies outside…”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“How do you eat your roots?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“This world is out of date”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“That night as I cried myself to sleep I knew that, somewhere in the sky, Karim was doing the same; and some of my tears were his tears, and some of his tears were mine.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“And yet. When I read the Dawn on line and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that I understood the unspoken as much as the articulated among its inhabitants; I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing; I knew I couldn’t think of Karachi and find any easy answers, and I didn’t know how to decide if that was reason to go back or reason to stay away.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“I can see you, out there, reading between the lines. Come home, stranger. Come home, untangler of my thoughts. Come home and tell me, what do I do with this breaking heart of mine?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Those Genes Could Have Been Mine”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“The truths we conceal don't disappear Raheen, they appear in different forms”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“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, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Yes, I’d still have Sonia. And Zia. And so many other things that Karim no longer had. I’d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promoted ‘Garunteed no cockroach’, and, yes, there’s still be those bottles of creamy, flavored milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani; oh, yes, yes, yes, and all that, and all that again. So why complain? Why contemplate words like ‘longing’?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Can angels lie spine to spine?
If not, how they must envy us humans”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“Don’t, please, don’t disappear.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“All around us, Karachi kept moving”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“He hung up so gently, I didn’t even hear the click.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“I still hear the world spinning.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography: A Lyrical Literary Romance of Fated Love and Secrets in Pakistan

“you can only know how you feel in the here and now, not how you’ll feel years, months or even days down the line.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography