My husband lived in Lucknow. My father lived in Delhi, of course. So I shuttled between Delhi and Lucknow and...naturally, if my husband needed me on days when I was in Delhi, I ran back to Lucknow. But if it was my father who needed me, on the days when I was in Lucknow. And...yes, my husband got angry. And he quarreled. We quarreled. We quarreled a lot. It's true.

The doctors advised me not to have even one. My health was still not good, and they said that pregnancy might be fatal. If they hadn't said that to me, maybe I wouldn't have got married. But that diagnosis provoked me, it infuriated me. I answered, 'Why do you think I'm getting married if not to have children? I don't want to hear that I can't have children; I want you to tell me what I have to do in order to have children!'

To be a mother, a housewife, never cost me any sacrifice - I savored every minute of those years.

I want to state that there will be friendship between Bangladesh and ourselves. And not a one-sided friendship, of course - no one does anything for nothing; each has something to give and something to take.

A nation' s strength ultimately consists in what it can do on its own, and not in what it can borrow from others.

I'm certainly not tired - work doesn't tire people, it's getting bored that's tiring.

Little by little I changed my mind, and when I was about eighteen, I began to consider the possibility of getting married. Not to have a husband, but to have children.