After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.

The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word 'senseless' springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.

By then The Kite Runner had become quite successful and I found myself in a position that I had always dreamed of my whole life, which was to write for a living.

You have extreme poverty and high crime and you have to admit that the governance of the Kabul regime has been poor and has been losing its popular legitimacy. You have a corrupt police force, not to mention homelessness, joblessness. The problems are huge.