“Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. T...”

“What naive garbage. People don't want freedom anymore--even those to whom freedom is a kind of religion are afraid of it, like trembling acolytes who make sacrifices to some pagan god. People want ...”

“The few Americans he had encountered in his lifetime had all seemed flat to him, as if freedom weakened one's capacity for intense emotion by demanding too little of it.”

“How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain." "Your mother is dense," Alif said wearily. "My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that is neither here nor t...”

“The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave th...”

“The only power worth a snot is the power to get up after you fall down.”

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”

“Its bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys games and work and manners!”

“Only time can heal your broken heart. Just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.”

“The future for me is already a thing of the past -You were my first love and you will be my last”

“He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable”

“A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”