“I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.”

Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.

There is a way to be good again.

I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

The experience of writing ‘The Kite Runner’ is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

You can not stop you from being who you are.

Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.

Life just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness. It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.

Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism.

Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock.

It’s tremendous what can happen when suddenly you make an emotional connection.

And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.

She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.