“Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.”

“Three things Marco taught me today race through my mind: boys will lie to your face just to have sex with you, don’t trust any boy who says I love you, and never date a boy who lives on the south side of Fairfield.”

“I never see any difference in boys. I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys and beef-faced boys.”

“And one more thing...You will never again refer to him as 'Hazara boy' in my presence. He has a name and it's Sohrab.”

“Perhaps it's called the end of the world because it's the end of the games, because I can go to one of the villages and become one of the little boys working and playing there, with nothing to kill and nothing to kill me, just living there. As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what "just living" might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.”

“The thing about teen idol," Louisa is saying, "is he morphs through time. The boys' faces and names change, but the emotional need they fulfill, well, that never changes.”