and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.

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.

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.

When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

The truth is that no one who hasn't actually experienced the senseless chaos and violence of combat can possibly understand it, but those who have and who try to explain it to the rest of us are offering us a precious gift: a part of their soul that's been scorched in the flames of Hell. It's a little like trying to describe music to the deaf or color to the blind ... to make the irrational somewhat sensible, which is always confusing and frustrating, and ultimately futile.

I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.

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