How glorious it was to know that her love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being.
I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.
All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I've ever written was because I don't have a choice. I write stories because I can't wait to tell it, I can't wait to see how it ends.
I know. I know. But he's always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he's lost in some dream." "And?" "I wasn't like that." Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Khan laughed. "Children aren't colouring books. You don't get to fill them with your favourite colours.
I'm so afraid. Because I'm so profoundly happy. Happiness like this is frightening...They only let you this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.
Except he'd been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster. That was the night I became an insomniac.
Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).
She shook the dice in her hands, seemed to reconsider.
The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.
I can't help but see the wariness, the effort, the impatience. I can't help but see two people together out of a sense of genetic duty, doomed already to bewilder and disappoint each other, each honor-bound to defy the other.
God Has a reason.
I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word.
In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.
I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.
It's a funny thing, Markos, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.
Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.
Thinking of him, of the anguish of his final days, and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I wanted to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you're going to sleep, the ones you've already forgotten by the time you wake up.
The moment is brief, barely enough for a flutter of the pulse but long enough for her illusory self to catch up with the reality of the woman gazing back from the shopwindow. It is a little devastating. This is what aging is, she thinks.
In my experience, men who undestand women as well as you seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.
No one snaps our composure quite like someone we love.
Marriage can wait, education cannot.
If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.
Too much beauty, it corrupts things.
There is only what you do and what you don't do.
What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
I lay on the side of the dirt road next to a rocky trench, looked up to the gray morning sky, thankful for air, thankful for light, thankful to be alive.
I see you've confused what you're learning in school with actual education.
They say Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one your never had in mind.
Out beyond ideas.
There is a way to be good again...
To me, families are puzzles that take a lifetime to work out - or not, as often is the case - and I like to explore how people within them try to connect, be it through love, duty, or circumstance.
Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.
She will not plant the seed in their mind, that a parent is capable of abandoning her children, of saying to them You are not enough. For Pari, the children and Eric have always been enough. They always will be.
Zendagi migzara. Life goes on.
I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills.
Itukan hanya mimpi Amir agha. Dalam mimpi kita bisa melakukan apa saja - Hassan.
Mamà believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. She also believed it was always best to tell the truth, to tell it plainly, without fanfare, and the more disagreeable the truth, the sooner you had to tell it.
When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.
When guilt leads to good.
A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver.
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
You know nothing of courage." said Baba Ayub. "For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose." You have your life to lose, said the div. "You already took that from me.
In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.
I will follow you to the ends of the world.
Afghanistan is doomed if women are barred once again from public life.
People…shouldn't be allowed to have new children if they'd already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn't fair.
Inside Laila too a battle was being waged : guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never see each other again.
Today Baba got a blister when he put his palm down on the hood of our rental car! Mother had to put toothpaste on it.
I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.
