He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.

Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful.

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.

All good things in life are fragile and easily lost

I don't know whom or what he was defying. [...] [M]aybe the God he had never believed in.