The Chinese say it's better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.

It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

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

A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.

President Karzai is an incredibly kind and decent man. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he genuinely cares for his people. But I think he had too much of a tendency to want to rule by listening to all voices at all times.

It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.