The West wants unconditional love; failing that, unconditional surrender.
Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone’s life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.
There are no innocent people in a guilty nation.
How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.
Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another’s loneliness.
This is among the few things that can be said about love with any confidence. It is small enough to be contained within the heart but, pull thin, it would drape the entire world.
As a writer, my homeland is the desk where I work.
All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.
History is the third parent.
A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.
Nothing is an accident: it’s always someone’s fault; perhaps-but no one teaches us how to live with our mistakes. Everyone is isolated, alone with his or her anguish and guilt, and too penetrating a question can mean people are not able to face one another the next day.
There are times in this life when a person must do or say things he doesn’t want to. Human beings and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world.
To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.
The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.
All those who love know exactly the limit they’re prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.
Paper is the strongest material in the world; paper can handle what I can’t.
She thought of the boy thrown into the cauldron of war, the girl beset by various bigotries, her life in danger, and saw how unjust it all was, her fury limitless for a few moments. And she felt a sense of shame, something akin to accusation from them towards her and her generation, for not having constructed a better world to welcome and contain their beauty, to house their spirit. –.
In some respects, grief for the lost and missing is worse than grief for the dead, and sometimes just for a fraction of a second its intensity makes her wish Mikal would cease to exist, so she wouldn’t have to wonder if she will ever see him again.
Sometimes a man has to be great enough to know how insignificant he is.
To have not succeeded in the world was required to be a source of shame for a person. And yet she suspected that failure in worldly terms was the condition of the majority people of the world. To have been rejected, to have lacked courage, to have tried but failed.