I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.

A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there?

Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.