Decisions. Where, what, why. Can’t handle them. So I’m prolonging the indecision with higher education.
You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.
How do you eat your roots?
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.
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.
Somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same.
For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.
Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.
Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.
A man needed fire in his veins to burn through the world, not ice to freeze everything in place.
Grief never leaves, It merely sinks into you.
There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.
When the war’s over, I’ll be kind.
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.
Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make anything less valuable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.