I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.
So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.
Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it’s very, very conservative, very tribal – almost medieval.
A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver.
You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.
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.
Don’t be afraid to tell the truth. It’s better to hurt someone by truth than to make them happy by lies.
She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.
James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?
He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.
All my life, I’d been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.
A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.
Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.
Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.
Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her.
Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.
I will follow you to the ends of the world.
There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. – Amir.
I don’t outline at all; I don’t find it useful, and I don’t like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.
There isn’t, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.