Educate yourself, learn about what refugees face when they don't have homes, after they have lost everything.

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.

it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

It's tremendous what can happen when suddenly you make an emotional connection.

Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.

Inside Laila too a battle was being waged : guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never see each other again.

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.