"I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away"

"If people volunteered in the same way to construct schools or roads or even clear the river of plastic wrappers, by God, Pakistan would become a paradise within a year."

"Is Islam such a weak religion that it cannot tolerate a book written against it? Not my Islam!"

"I don't want awards, I want my daughter. I wouldn't exchange a single eyelash of my daughter for the whole world."

"I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right."

"We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formulae instead of flowers and butterflies."

"The Taliban could take our pens and books, but they couldn’t stop our minds from thinking."

"Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don't think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children."

"My mother always told me,"hide your face-people are looking at you".I would reply,"it does not matter;I am also looking at them"

"The long road has drained me of all feelings and expectations. I don’t feel a thing or expect anything now."

"In Damascus: the traveler sings to himself: I return from Syria neither alive nor dead but as clouds that ease the butterfly’s burden from my fugitive soul"

"I am here. Anything more than that is rumor and slander"

"Had I known you, I would have possessed you, and had you known me, you would have possessed me. But then you and I would not be."

"This peace will leave us as a cluster of dust..."

"I'll search in mythology and archeology and in every -ology to my old name. one of the goddesses of Canaan will side with me, then swear with a flash of lightning. This is my orphan son"

"So let there be prose. There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph"

"He says I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. I have two names which meet and part… I have two languages, but I have long forgotten— which is the language of my dreams"

"In a world that has no heaven the earth becomes an abyss. And the poem is one of its consolation prizes. One of the qualities of the winds, north or south"

"I know who opens the door to the jasmine tree as it makes our dreams blossom for the evening's guests."

"If there must be a moon, let it be high, a high moon made in Baghdad, neither Arab, nor Persian, nor claimed by the goddesses all around us."

"I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home."

"... For me it is essential, essential for the poet to have a new toast, new songs."

"And you became like the coffee, In the deliciousness, and the bitterness and the addiction."

"One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my visions."