It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…

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.

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

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

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

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

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,...

At times , he didn’t understand the meaning of the Koran’s words . But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue . He said they...

I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

There is only one sin. and that is theft… when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.

And that, …is the story of our country, one invasion after another…Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

She thought of Aziza’s stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

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...

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

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

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

there is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those...

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.

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.

She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up into the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke silently...

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.

Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can’t breathe then, like...

She wished she could visit Mariam’s grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn’t matter. Mariam is never very far…. Mariam is in her own...

you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.

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...

Who rebels with mathematics?

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

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...

these random unkind moment that catch you wen you least expect them.

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. – Amir

Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel...

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

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

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.