If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.

I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.

A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.

Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.

‎I know you're still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.

You are never alone in Afghanistan. You are always in the company of others, usually family. You don't understand yourself really as an individual, you understand yourself as part of something bigger than yourself. Family is so central to your identity, to how you make sense of your world, it is very dramatic, and therefore an amazing source of storytelling, a source of fiction for me.

Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.