Best of Friends Quotes

“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, Best of Friends

“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, Best of Friends

“This is how you know you aren’t young any more: you start to care more about thread count than immediate gratification.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“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, Best of Friends

“Cricket told you that talent and grit and character would win out, that giants could be felled, that today’s defeat could always be followed by tomorrow’s victory. Yes, there were errors and injustices, cruelty even. But beyond that was the game itself, radiant and untainted.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“Perhaps friendship was not only about what you said to each other, but also about what you didn't”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“she was filled with the satisfaction of being with a group of people and knowing the words and tone that would produce exactly the effect you wanted. This was what was meant by belonging and home, words she understood in the”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“Their conversations were almost all domestic now – about Zola, mostly; but also grocery shopping, home improvements, summer holiday plans, whether it was time to invite some or other combination of their families over for lunch.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“They opt in to being tagged by their friends. That’s a different thing to the police watching you at all times because you’re a climate activist or a guy who goes to a mosque.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“talking about the death threats and trolling that inevitably, and depressingly, attach themselves to a migrant Muslim woman who has become the voice of Britain’s conscience since she took on the position of Director at Britain’s oldest civil liberties organisation a decade ago.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“thought firing Abu Bakr would have taught you a lesson about lying, conniving and implicating other people in your crimes,’ he said. ‘I’m amazed Zahra’s parents haven’t banished you from her life.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“Benazir was Prime Minister; she had taken the oath of office in a bright green shalwar with white dupatta, the colours of the Pakistan flag, and made the men around her look like pygmies.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“Your father doesn’t see any of this. Little princeling wants a crown on his head and his hands lily-white. He can’t have both. Why do you have to be”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“But for Maryam, university was just an interruption before she could take over the family business. The only future that mattered to her was the one that would unfold in Karachi, a city to which Zahra had no intention of returning once she’d left it.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“Lucky,’ Zahra said, and Maryam grinned. She liked nothing better than to be compared to Lucky Santangelo, heroine of the Jackie Collins novels, composed in equal parts of courage, ruthlessness and loyalty.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

“When you live in an unjust world you want sports to be a refuge, not a reminder.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends