“People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.”

“A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.”

“there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life... you steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a ather. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness... there is no act more wretched than stealing.”

“I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.”

“They would make new lives for themselves—peaceful, solitary lives—and there the weight of all that they'd endured would lift from them, and they would be deserving of all the happiness and simple prosperity they would find.”

“There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.”

“I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.”