Kalau kau tidak terus-terusan melihat ke langit, kau tidak akan bertahan lama.
Seorang anak laki-laki yang tak mampu membela dirinya sendiri akan tumbuh menjadi pria yang tak mampu menghadapi masalah apapun.
Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended. Our way of life.
Dostet darum.” I love you. “I love you back,” she said. I could hear the smile in her words. “And be careful.
Tidak ada kata yang terucap, tidak ada yang perlu kami katakan, inilah harta yang dimiliki oleh mereka yang menyimpan kenangan yang sama, yang saling menjadi kenangan pertama, yang menyusu dari payudara yang sama.
This is why the Holy Koran forbids sharab. Because it always falls on the sober to pay for the sins of the drunk. So it does.
I rescued him from the certainty of a turmoil and put him in a turmoil of uncertainty.
Takes a donkey to know a donkey.
Mariam wondered how so many women could suffer the same miserable luck, to have married, all of them, such dreadful men.
The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.
Mariam longed to place a ruler on a page and draw important-looking lines.
Exploitation to finance a beach house in Hawaii was one thing. Doing it to feed your kids was another.
I want to scream again, and I remember that last time I felt this way, riding with Baba in the tank of the fuel truck, buried in the dark with other refugees. I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my leg blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away. There will be no other reality tonight.
No one snaps our composure quite like someone we love.
Aku harus berkonsentrasi, tidak boleh melakukan kesalahan.
Jika kau sudah hidup selama aku, kau akan mengerti bahwa kekejaman dan kemuliaan hanyalah nuansa yang berbeda dari warna yang sama.
That there was in her life the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence. Sometimes it was vague, like a message sent across shadowy byways and vast distances, a weak signal on a radio dial, remote, warbled. Other times it felt so clear, this absence, so intimately close it made her heart lurch.
Dan jika kau miskin, penderitaan menjadi mata uangmu.
Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they’re just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nang and namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.
Anak-anak bukanlah buku mewarnai. Kau tidak bisa begitu saja mengisi mereka dengan warna-warna kesukaanmu.