“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.”

A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

True redemption is when guilt leads to good.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

But then it passed, as all things do.

When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

In many parts of the world, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

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.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

Always be the best, my boy, the bravest, and hold your head up high above all the others. Never disgrace the generation of your fathers. They were the bravest champions.

The willingness to show up changes us, It makes us a little braver each time.

The future doesn’t belong to the light-hearted. It belongs to the brave.

It is easy to be brave at a safe distance.

I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.

For the children. For the brave youngsters. For their smiles. We remain committed to young cancer sufferers and continue to support the investigation efforts into this illness in young people:

Bravery without forethought, causes a man to fight blindly and desperately like a mad bull. Such an opponent, must not be encountered with brute force, but may be lured into an ambush and slain.