She had this laugh. I swear it's why I married her, Laila, for that laugh! It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it.
Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls. Laila
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.
Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist.
Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one...Mariam wished she's been a better daughter to Nana. She wished she's understood then what she understood now about motherhood.
Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.
Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person has to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
Kabul is . . . Idris searches for the right words. A thousand tragedies per square mile.
It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.
It always hurts more to have and loose than not to have in first place
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,...
In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.
If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar.
I'm so afraid. Because I'm so profoundly happy. Happiness like this is frightening...They only let you this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.
Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.
Here is what I do on the first day of snowfall every year: I step out of the house early in the morning, still in my pajamas, hugging my arms against the chill. I find the driveway, my father’s car, t...
He loathed Jimmy Carter, whom he called a big-toothed cretin. In 1980, when we were still in Kabul, the U.S. announced it would be boycotting the Olympic Games in Moscow. Wah wah! Baba exclaimed with...