But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even tho...
A lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it.
But the child is silent, looking as though he would rather understand than speak.
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...
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 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.
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...
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.
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...
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 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.
In some respects, grief for the lost and missing is worse than grief for the dead, and sometimes just for a fraction of a second its intensity makes her wish Mikal would cease to exist, so she wouldn’...
Basie would lie on the mattress and talk endlessly, sometimes drinking from a bottle of Murree’s whisky he’d bring with him, bought from one of the clandestine bars in Heer where there were locked cag...
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.
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...
If I take dust in my hand and ask you if that is all the dust there is, you will answer that dust is everywhere on earth. More specks than can ever be numbered. So I can give you a handful of truth on...