1. “Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.”
2. “A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.”
3. “Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
4. “She had this laugh. I swear it’s why I married her, Laila, for that laugh! It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it.”
5. “But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her”
6. “But Laila decided that she will not be crippled by resentment. Mariam wouldn’t want it that way.”
7. “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
8. “This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.”
9. “Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”
10. “But Mariam hardly noticed, hardly cared…the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice, Hope, a treacherous illusion.”
11. “Love is a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion”
12. “‘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.”
13. “I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!.”
14. “So it would begin. The obligatory questions, the perfunctory answers. Both pretending. Unenthusiastic partners, the two of them, in this tired old dance.”
15. “A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated…”
16. “I know you’re still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You’re a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.”
17. “Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.”
18. “Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for most part has been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.”
19. “yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism.”
20. “But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn’t, in the end, save it all.”
21. “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.”
22. “And that, …is the story of our country, one invasion after another…Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.”
23. “For the first time, Mariam could hear him with Nana’s ears. She could hear so clearly now the insincerity that had always lurked beneath,”
24. “Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”
25. “She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed. ”
26. “What are you, fifteen? That’s a good, solid marrying age for a girl.”
27. “Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer.”
28. “Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”
29. “You know the old bit,” he said. “You’re on a deserted island. You can have five books. Which do you choose? I never thought I’d actually have to.”
30. “she is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.”
31. “You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.”
32. “To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things.”
33. “Miriam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her.”
34. “Marriage can wait, education cannot.”
35. “She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How she could ever cope with his permanent absence?”
36. “Marriage can wait. Education cannot…Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.”
37. “She was just about the liveliest, happiest person I’d ever met.” He smiled at the memory. “She had this laugh. I swear it’s why I married her, Laila, for that laugh. It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it.”
38. “How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.”
39. “People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.”
40. “You can not stop you from being who you are.”
41. “women and men were equal in every way and there was no reason women should cover if men didn’t.”
42. “I dare, I dare allow myself the hope that, after you read this, you will be more charitable to me than I ever was to you. That you might find it in your heart to come and see your father. That you will knock on my door one more time and give me the chance to open it this time, to welcome you, to take you in my arms, my daughter, as I should have done all those years ago. It is a hope as weak as my heart. This I know. But I will be waiting. I will be listening for your knock. I will be hoping.”
43. “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.”
44. “She had never in her life felt so alone.”
45. “The Chinese say it’s better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.”
46. “Mariam is never very far…Mariam is in her heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.”
47. “Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can’t breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.”
48. “I will follow you to the ends of the world.”
49. “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.”
50. “But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,’ she said, ‘then Hakim is your man.”
51. “it always falls on the sober to pay for the sins of the drunk.”
52. “Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”
53. “I’ll die if you go. The Jinn will come, and I’ll have one of my fits. You’ll see, I’ll swallow my tongue and die. Don’t leave me, Mariam jo. Please stay. I’ll die if you go.”
54. “Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.”
55. “Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
56. “She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.”
57. “They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death.”
58. “Regret… when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.”
59. “There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.”
60. “They would make new lives for themselves—peaceful, solitary lives—and there the weight of all that they’d endured would lift from them, and they would be deserving of all the happiness and simple prosperity they would find.”
61. “and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.”
62. “But, miraculously, something of her former life remained, her last link to the person she had been before she had become so utterly alone. A part of Tariq still alive inside her, sprouting tiny arms, growing translucent hands.”
63. “A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.”
64. “And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.”
65. “You changed the subject.”
“From what?”
“The empty-headed girls who think you’re sexy.”
“You know.”
“Know what?”
“That I only have eyes for you.”
66. “Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”
67. “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
68. “Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”
69. “Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person has to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
70. “the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion”
71. “Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories.”
72. “would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would all come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their astonishing imprudence. Their clumsiness. The pain of the act, the pleasure of it, the sadness of it. The heat of their entangled bodies.”
73. “And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last.”