“Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not learned to stifle with words.”

“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 finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.”

“Word of mouth is often louder than word of hand, although applause can be deafening. I clap like Helen Keller drank coffee—with two spoonfuls of silence.”

“In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.”

“Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.”