“I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.”

Some stories don’t need telling.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

All good things in life are fragile and easily lost.

I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.

War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.

She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you.

A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.

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.

I finally had what I’d wanted all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.

For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything

Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.

Afghanistan has always been sort of a fractured nation, very tribal, where the countryside and the distant provinces have been run by custom, by tribal law and by tribal leaders rather than edicts from the central government in Kabul.

At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.

Who knew the shortest nights would stay with us the longest? – solstice.

Our Guardian Angels are our most faithful friends, because they are with us day and night, always and everywhere. We ought often to invoke them.

Felling a tree and gazing at the cut end – tonight’s moon.

When I am in the battlefield, I love it more than my wedding night with the most beautiful of women

Something in your eyes captured my soul, and every night I see you in my dreams. You’re all I know. I can’t let go.

I thought about the days i had handed over to a bottle the nights i can’t remember the mornings I slept thru all the time spent running from myself.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.