But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

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.

J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.

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

It's tremendous what can happen when suddenly you make an emotional connection.

Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful.