You say their stories, it is gift they give you.
When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.
Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world.
I may not agree with all or even most of the tribal traditions, but it seems ti me that, out there, people live more authentic lives. They have a sturdiness about them. A refreshing humility. Hospitality too. And resilience. A sense of pride.
People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don’t they? Like a badge? I’m being genuine.
The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.
Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.
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.
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.
The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don’t like to read.
Now, especially in public places, you always have that unease. When the children were cast, if I thought that they might be victims of violence because of participating in this movie, we would have chosen children from outside this country.
But then it passed, as all things do.
Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.
If you were the poor, suffering was your currency.
At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.
People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.
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.
All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.
At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.
The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.