Though there had been moments of beauty in it Mariam knew that life for most part had been unkind to her.But as she walked the final twenty paces,she could not help but wish for more...

He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn’t. It spilled out of her, came pouring out her eyes.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

I loved him in that moment, loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone, and I wanted to to tell them all that I was the snake in the grass, the monster in the lake....

Hassan couldn’t read a first-grade textbook but he’d read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.

Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which sometimes played old Pashto songs were played, time stretched and contracted depending...

The Chinese say it’s better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.

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

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...

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life.Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. Sohrab’s silence...

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

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.

Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

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

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...

War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.” – Baba

She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How she could ever cope with his permanent absence?

The reputation of a girl … is a delicate thing. Like a mynah bird in your hands. slacken your grip and away it flies.

and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.

What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits.

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...

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.

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.

Durante un par de horas cada jueves, cuando Yalil la visitaba, entre sonrisas y regalos y palabras cariñosas, Mariam se sentía merecedora de toda la belleza y los obsequios que podía ofrecer la vida. Y...

Kabul fell prey to men who looked like they had tumbled out of their mothers with Kalashnikov in hand…

That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped...

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

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...

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way...

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.

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

When you kill a man, You steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, Rob his children of a father.

A man’s plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand…well, God put a lot of thought in making you.

I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.

He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more, to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty. He sighed...

I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land… it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home...

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

He scarcely knew who was battling whom, who was winning, who was losing, as though he hoped that by doggedly ignoring the war it would return the favor

Give sustenance, Allah.Give sustenance to me.

Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know.Laila...

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

There is only one sin, only one, and that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right of a...

I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of...

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.

I’ve crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they’re all the same,...

Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one. 

Ahesta boro, Mah-e-man, ahesta boro.

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that...