You say their stories, it is gift they give you.

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.

In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.

And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

If my book generates any sort of dialogue among Afghans, then I think it will have done a service to the community.

I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history.

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.