You’re not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.

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

You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.

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

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.

And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.