The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.