But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her

You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.

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.

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.

The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.

Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism

Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. "For you," he said. "I'd kill with it for you, Laila.

Life is a train, get on board.

They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.

Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.

I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.

The finger cut, to save the hand.

And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

Sad stories make good books

The past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion

And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.

It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.

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.

I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.

Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.

I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart

Blood is a powerful thing

That's how children deal with terror, they fall asleep.

Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price?

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.

He knew I'd seen everything in that alley, that I'd stood there and done nothing. He knew that I'd betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.

I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.

All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

I think that everything he did, feeding the poor, giving money to friends in need, it was all a way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.

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

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ''For you a thousand times over!'' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.

A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.

Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice,hope, a treacherous illusion".