But the child is silent, looking as though he would rather understand than speak.
There are no innocent people in a guilty nation.
The young everywhere…would prefer to live in houses that consist only of doors.
The scent of the tree's flowers can stop conversation. Rohan knows no purer source of melancholy.
Only twenty - nine years in the entire human history had been without warfare, and now here he was too, travelling between the episodes of a rapacious civil war.
How easy it is to create ghosts, he thinks as he begins to die a minute later, feeling his mind closing chamber by chamber, the memory of Naheed contained in each one. And despite it all it means much...
He knows that had he been a young man himself he would not have stopped at Peshawar: he doesn’t know how he would have resisted entering Afghanistan. And not just for help and aid – he would have foug...
A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.
Wolves exhibiting strange behaviour -- caught in traps and thrashing about, injured by other creatures or by bullets, pups suffering from epilepsy -- are attacked and killed by their pack members. But...
The forgiveness of the weak is the air you strong ones breath, David. Didn't you know? You don't see it but you felt it just then. They you to go on living.
The West wants unconditional love; failing that, unconditional surrender.
She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having ren...
He would drift through the house in search of the coolest spot to read through the long summer afternoons that had a touch of eternity to them, altering the arrangement of his limbs as much for comfor...
The bigger the sin, the rarer and more expensive the bird that is needed to erase it. Is that how the bird pardoner conducts his business? A sparrow for a small deception, but a paradise flycatcher an...
She thought of the boy thrown into the cauldron of war, the girl beset by various bigotries, her life in danger, and saw how unjust it all was, her fury limitless for a few moments. And she felt a sen...
Do you hear it? Yes, Mikal replies. It’s a battle, isn’t it? Yes. It’s the world, one of the other men says. The world sounds like this all the time, we just don’t hear it. Then sometimes in some plac...
As a child he used to wonder why Eve was taken from Adam’s rib. Now, at the other end of his life, these decades later, he knows it was because the rib is close to the heart.
You have spent your whole life believing such untrue things. Don't you know how alone you are, David? We are most alone when we are with the myths.
The neighbourhood is a place of...intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street, their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputa...
Nothing is an accident: it's always someone's fault; perhaps-but no one teaches us how to live with our mistakes. Everyone is isolated, alone with his or her anguish and guilt, and too penetrating a q...