"I would have told them that he lived a life lacking in purpose or direction. Like those aimless rides I took him on. A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by. An indifferent life."

"If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork."

"It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out."

"To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things."

"Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy meant to live on, stung that she was not the reason. She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed."

"Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is."

"Who rebels with mathematics?"

"Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist."

"Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly."

"In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things."

"Her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head."

"If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing."

"I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin."

"I know that in the end, God will forgive me. He will forgive your father, me, and you too. I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive me if you wish. But most important, forgive yourself."

"Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!"

"Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam."

"In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them."

"Once, when I was little, I asked her if she'd cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren't sad?Because it was nobody's business if I was."

"He knew I betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time."

"My books are about ordinary people, like you, me, people on the street, people who really have an expectation of reasonable happiness in life, want their life to have a sense of security and predictability, who want to belong to something bigger than them, who want love and affection in their life, who want a good future for the children."

"A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bare to lose."

"Marriage can wait, education cannot."

"Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food."

"I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle."

"Nothing came out. Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above."

"Sad stories make good books."

"I finally had what I'd wantes all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into."

"I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again."

"On a high mountain I stood, And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts."

"In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst."

"I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years."

"He had the blue kite in his hands, that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips."

"I welcome you to my home as my son, as the husband of my daughter who is the noor of my eye. Your pain will be our pain, your joy our joy. I hope that you will come to see your Khala and Jamila and me as a second set of parents, and I pray for your and our lovely Soraya jan's happiness. you both have our blessings."

"You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel."

"I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly."

"War. Or, rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain. The names changed, as did the faces, and I spit on them equally for all the petty feuds, the snipers, the land mines, bombing raids, the rockets, the looting and raping and killing."

"Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight."

"I was good at being a doctor my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege."

"You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him."

"A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it."

"She was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back.She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother."

"And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too."

"And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last."

“About clichés. Avoid them like the plague.”

"The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to."

"I will follow you to the ends of the world."

"Exploitation to finance a beach house in Hawaii was one thing. Doing it to feed your kids was another."

"Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly."

"I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it did not care a whit about the hopes and reams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that."

"Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one."