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.
Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
The Chinese say it’s better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.
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.
Give sustenance, Allah. Give sustenance to me.
They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.
I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.
What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
I don’t know the nuts and bolts of writing. I studied medicine. I was a pre-med nerd. So everything I learned, I know about writing is very instinctive.
Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock. And.
I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.
I didn’t remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.
You’re not going to cry, are you? – I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.
In the end, the world always wins. That’s just the way of things.
Sad stories make good books.
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.
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.