I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!

People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don't they? Like a badge? I'm being genuine.

She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.

But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man.