Sad stories make good books

I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!

The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.

I remember reading 'The Grapes of Wrath' in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in English where I had an 'Aha!' moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter.

Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.