“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”

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.

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.

And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

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.

And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

Hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.

I’m gladly doing my own thing for the time being.

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.

It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.

He threw a lot of strikes, worked it inside and out, threw breaking balls for strikes behind in the count.

I ache with everything in me to make it count, so that when I finally cross the finish line, I’ll hear the words, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.

Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers

You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.

No amount of reading or memorizing will make you successful in life. It is the understanding and application of wise thought which counts.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.