20 Quotes by Fatima Farheen Mirza

Just one more moment. Just give us one more. But maybe her heart would never be satisfied; maybe it was ever-enlarging in its want for me. Because she knew that if she were granted one more moment, then another one was what she would ask for. She could live around her son for a hundred years and even then, when it was time to part, she would think - but it has been too brief.

Against her own instincts, her own intuition, because she WANTS to believe him, because she has known him his whole life and cannot fathom a change so drastic he would be made unfamiliar to her.

Where did they come from, her children? And how did they arrive already themselves, and unlike anyone else?

Maybe what a son evoked in a father was different than what a daughter evoked? It would be all right. She was only afraid that when time passed, it would not be these trips to the library he would remember, or his eagerness to learn how she made roti in the kitchen with him as her helper, but how upset he would become when Rafiq scolded him.

For a moment, Layla glanced at Amar's journals, but she could barely make sense of his handwriting. Each deciphered sentence threatened to unravel her understanding of him and carried with it the threat of more secrets. It did not matter that she was his mother. What she could ever hope to know of him was just a glimpse -- like the beam of a lighthouse skipping out, only one stretch of waves visible at a time, the rest left in the unknowable dark.

A hundred times. If not more. She was stunned and stunned again by them, and her love for them. How much had been lost? Never made it into her memory, never been captured in a photograph?

I did exactly what Hadia's being celebrated for. No! I did what I thought was so important to you. I chose someone for the community. And I loved her, Mama. I loved her.

I let my anger get too carried away, I told myself, I should have stopped before I did what I did. Anger was my worst attribute. It was as if I left myself when it shot up in me, and by the time I was rid of it I had already done the damage. And even thought I could justify why I had reacted the way I had, I always regretted my particular action.

I panicked, not knowing what my children were capable of, having been made aware suddenly that the limit of their behavior was nothing my greatest fears could even conjure...Maybe anything we could have wanted to instill in them was, at best, a hope.