The film [Kite Runner] was not as big a hit in the United States as it was worldwide, I think it may have been swallowed up by all the other movies it had to go up against.

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.

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

I have been a fan of comic books since childhood.

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

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

When I went to Afghanistan in 2003, I walked into a war zone. Entire neighborhoods had been demolished. There were an overwhelming number of widows and orphans and people who had been physically and emotionally damaged; every 10-year-old kid on the street knew how to dismantle a Kalashnikov in under a minute. I would flip through math textbooks intended for third grade, fourth grade, and they would include word problems such as, "If you have 100 grenades and 20 mujahideen, how many grenades per mujahideen do you get?" War has infiltrated every facet of life.