Quote collection
356 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way."
"My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write."
"Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period."
"There will be no floating waway. There will be no other reality tonight."
"Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child."
"Air grew heavy, damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks."
"A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it."
"Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him."
"Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not."
"She would grab whatever she could -a look , a whisper , a moan - to salvage from perishing , to perserve. But time is most unforgivving of fires , and she couldn't , in the end , save it all ."
"But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man."
"I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID."
"I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift."
"Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine. Held for a moment. Flew away."
"I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse."
"If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar."
"James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?"
"The finger cut, to save the hand."
"In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality."
"Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons."