“Fire can destroy or purify, strengthen or weaken, all depending on the nature of the material being burned. Pain has the same effects on the human soul, and for the same reasons.”

“I have never seen genius without a touch of madness... and vice versa.”

“Great language and great literature do not survive long without each other”

“Man is slow because he hesitates”

“There are few things more powerful than a name. A single phrase that somehow becomes a symbol for an entire existence.”

“Cowards are always much more dangerous than heroes.”

“There are so many unsung heroines and heroes at this broken moment in our collective story, so many courageous persons who, unbeknownst to themselves, are holding together the world by their resolu...”

“Never give up hope, no matter how dark things may seem.”

“That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, t...”

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

“It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.”

“Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give youa closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest, never forgive a man who wants to save you.”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”