Quote collection
356 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I came to the US as an immigrant and I recall vividly those first few years in California, the brief time we spent on welfare, and the difficult task of assimilating into a new culture."
"You have these crops of poppies that supply something like 90% of the heroin sold in Europe and actually represents more than half of the Afghanistan's GDP."
"Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said."
"I'm gladly doing my own thing for the time being."
"He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives."
"some stories don't need telling"
"In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all."
"She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me."
"Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought into making you."
"Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work."
"No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life."
"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."
"Regret... when it comes to you, I have oceans of it."
"At times , he didn't understand the meaning of the Koran's words . But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue . He said they comforted him , eased his heart . "They'll comfort you too . Mrariam jo , " he said . "You can summon then in your time of your need , and they won't fail you . God's words will never betray you , my girl . (pg.17)"
"I think he loved us equally, but differently."
"I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home"
"All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari."
"In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst."
"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."
"All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman."