I get daily e-mails from Afghans who thank me for writing this book [The Kite Runner], as they feel a slice of their story has been told by one of their own. So, for the most part, I have been overwhelmed with the kindness of my fellow Afghans.

Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.

It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.

No matter where we're born, which countries we're raised in, what cultures we come from, there are some universal experiences we all have as children. We all kind of start the same. We want the love of our parents, companionship, friends, we want to have fun, to play, and we're all hurt the first time we learn that the world is far from perfect place - it's the start of a series of epiphanies and realizations that is what growing up is all about.

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

If I ever do get married," Tariq said, "they'll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head

He knew I'd seen everything in that alley, that I'd stood there and done nothing. He knew that I'd betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.