I guess some stories do not need telling.
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.
You don’t order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them ‘sister’ the next.
It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.
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.
She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.
It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.
You’ve always been a tourist here. You just didn’t know it.
Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.
After everything he’d built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.
I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great.
In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.
Life is a train, get on board.
All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I’ve ever written was because I don’t have a choice. I write stories because I can’t wait to tell it, I can’t wait to see how it ends.
For a novelist, it’s kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture. That said, I’m in a unique position to speak on behalf of Afghanistan on certain issues that I feel are important, particularly the issue of Afghan refugees.
President Karzai is an incredibly kind and decent man. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he genuinely cares for his people. But I think he had too much of a tendency to want to rule by listening to all voices at all times.
I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It’s the only way I know how to write.
Without women taking an active role in Afghan society, rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be very difficult.
The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it’s story, it’s something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can’t get rid of, and I’ve got to see it through.
But Laila has decided that she will not be crippled by resentment. Mariam wouldn’t want it that way. ‘What’s the sense?’ she would say with a smile both innocent and wise. ‘What good is it, Laila jo?’ And so Laila has resigned herself to moving on. For her own sake, for Tariq’s, for her children’s. And for Mariam, who still visits Laila in her dreams, who is never more than a breath or two below her consciousness. Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.