When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

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

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.

and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

She passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and it accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.