Karachi Quotes

Summer in Karachi is brutal. The heat alone is ugly and unforgiving. Add unrelenting humidity, and the elements become merciless. The city sits on the sea but is surrounded by desert land that has been known to reach some of the hottest temperatures anywhere. When the heat reaches its peak, you feel baked in an oven and the thick, humid air gives everything an extra, hot skin. It's an effort to even lift your finger. You could get by with air-conditioning, but in this teeming, overpopulated Third World megapolis, it is a luxury few can afford. ~ Saad Shafqat

Ever seen a bullet-smashed windscreen?
The hole at the center becomes an eye. You see less through it but you gain focus, sharpness. That's how it is -- our wounds become our eyes. Seeing outside becomes seeing inside.
Listen. ~ Bilal Tanweer

There are a number of parallels between the slums of Brazil and those found in my hometown, Karachi. The dichotomy that exists in Brazil is uncannily similar to that found in Pakistan, and I hope to one day make a film that follows similar themes. ~ Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

My dear, you are not one person. You have many people in you, and each one can ask only some kinds of questions. ~ Bilal Tanweer

Less than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaida attacks were continuing: the firebombing of a synagogue in Tunisia in April, a bomb outside the U.S. Consulate in Karachi in June. ~ Bill Dedman

Things taste sweeter when you have some hunger left to linger. You feel it hunting your head for buried things; digging into the fractures of your breath warm and greedy. ~ Bilal Tanweer

people who ran away are friends! ~ Bilal Tanweer

This was the Karachi now – barbed wires protecting consulates, the pretentious covering themselves with faces of those who were hiding behind those barbed wires. This was Karachi – gaudy and luxurious, with a façade of glamor, ignoring the truth underneath. But Sophie was no cynic, and still loved the city she had returned to. 'You can't hate what's yours,' she smiled to herself. ~ Umair Naeem

I really love this city. It's so very beautiful. It's so multidimensional.People say it has a darkness and a decadence, which it tries to hide; they say it's full of the pretentious and opulent trying to strangle the dark reality. But that's true for most of the other great cities too ...
There is a soul here ... and that soul is as pure as the heat of the sun that shines down on it and the rain that falls to purify it. ~ Umair Naeem

It all fell away then – the control, the independence . . . everything. She had known it would never be easy to find
solitude . . . to find herself. Not in this city, where appearances were everything; where emptiness filled luxurious landscapes till there was nothing but hollow splendor…
She hated the pretense.
More than hatred, she was frightened of it. ~ Umair Naeem

KARACHI: The Karachi traffic police will be distributing free helmets for women as part of their 'Friends of Traffic' campaign, which hits the roads on June 8. ~ Anonymous

The day I won an Emmy was also the day my father passed away. I received a call from my sister on the way to the ceremony and had to turn my car around and catch the first flight back to Karachi. ~ Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

All around us, Karachi kept moving ~ Kamila Shamsie

Living in this city, you developed a certain relationship with violence and news of violence: you expected it, dreaded it, and then when it happened, you worked hard to look away from it, because there was nothing you could do about it - not even grieve, because you knew that it would happen again and maybe in a way that was worse than before. Grieving is possible only when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow. This city was full of bottled-up grief. ~ Bilal Tanweer

What appears strange and complex becomes stranger and more complicated once you begin to investigate it. That's the true nature of the world. ~ Bilal Tanweer

Constantine cursed the faujis again, and then he cursed Tom Cruise for having made that bloody Top Gun movie. Since then, an entire generation of faujis had grown up thinking they could be like him just by buying those cheap rip-off sunglasses for 200 rupees from Zainab Market. ~ Omar Shahid Hamid

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that's holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It's gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it's trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren't doing it in the streets." He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. "Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule - meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean. ~ Daniel Suarez

I'd been missing this, the ease of being with someone without speaking, without suppressing speech. I'd grown up with it in Karachi, where groups of men will congregate in the smallest spaces -- the grass between houses, a roundabout -- spaces made more generous through companionable silence. It existed between women too, this bond. My sister and her friends could spend hours reclining together on a bed, or a carpet. If secrets were murmured, it happened in a style so intuited it was pre-verbal. I hadn't experienced this very much in the West, where it seemed people had a reason for everything, including intimacy. ~ Uzma Aslam Khan

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

I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head. ~ Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

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. ~ Kamila Shamsie

[W]hereas a few hundred years ago man suspected and imagined that the universe was, for all intents and purposes, limitless, today he knows this to be true. His improved understanding of the material world around him has given him the means to make sure that his original conception of the universe was correct, in that every day its limits are being pushed aside and new horizons appear."

His Highness the Aga Khan's 1964 First World Socio-Economic Conference address (Karachi, Pakistan) ~ Aga Khan

From the safety and comfort of rarefied zip codes, open-border theorists tutor the little people in the positive economic effects on productivity and economic growth of high population density. But regular folks don't have to travel to Cairo or Karachi to discover that this urban theory is an urban myth. ~ Ilana Mercer

I went into isometrics training and looked at that. And she's pushing against the immovable. That has a lot of meaning for me. That you have to push against the immovable. You have to push. Even if you haven't got a prayer of moving it. Because even if you don't move it, you'll change yourself. You'll change something. Something will break open. That's where my heart is on that one. ~ Tricia Sullivan

a city is all about how you look at it ~ Bilal Tanweer

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

for the first time I am confronted with the fact that places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them. ~ Bilal Tanweer