and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man.

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.