Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you're breaithing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. Cut you have to breathe to scream. Panic.

Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.

I was overwhelmed with the kindness of people [in Afghanistan] and found that they had managed to retain their dignity, their pride, and their hospitality under unspeakably bleak conditions.

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

Those who saw Kite Runner loved the film, for the most part, people seemed to really like the film.

She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.