Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice,hope, a treacherous illusion".

A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.

He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ''For you a thousand times over!'' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.

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.

I think that everything he did, feeding the poor, giving money to friends in need, it was all a way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.

I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

He knew I'd seen everything in that alley, that I'd stood there and done nothing. He knew that I'd betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.

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.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price?

That's how children deal with terror, they fall asleep.

Blood is a powerful thing

I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart