There's nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than your life. And your life isn't more important than other people's lives.

Life is a train that stops at no stations; you either jump abroad or stand on the platform and watch as it passes.

I was depressed. I knew I was lost, but I had no idea how to find myself again. It was as though I was a different person, an infuriating, disappointing yet indispensable person whose body was my only home.

Posterity has never made the grave's embrace less cruel. It simply assuages our fear of death, because there is no better cure for out inevitable morality then the illusion of a beautiful eternity. But there is one illusion I still hold dear: that is the thought of an enlightened nation. That is the only future I still dream of.

We've already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we've forgotten it.

Though there are things beyond our understanding, for the most part we are the architects of our own unhappiness.

It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.