I experienced Kabul with my brother the way Amir and Hassan do: long school days in the summer, kite fighting in the winter time, westerns with John Wayne at Cinema Park, big parties at our house in Wazir Akbar Khan, picnics in Paghman.

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.

The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.

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

she held her breath, and in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day