Must have been quite the culture shock, going there.” “Yes it was.” Idris doesn’t say that the real culture shock has been in coming back.

I came from an educated, upper middle-class family. My mother was a Persian and history teacher at a large high school for girls. Many of the women in my extended family and in our circle of friends were professionals. In those days, women were a vital part of the economy in Kabul. They worked as lawyers, physicians, college professors, etc., which makes the tragedy of how they were treated by the Taliban that much more painful.

Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life.

People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.

[Barack Obama] is sending more troops [to Afghanistan], but they have also realized that we are not going to win that war through guns and tanks. We have to engage the neighbors, and it is good that there is a non-military strategy in addition to a military strategy. It is, at least, encouraging. Whether it will work or not, the jury is still put.

What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.