Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

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.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

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.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.