“A lot of childhood effort, worry, and whispering goes into cracking the codes of adult life. Children have to be accomplished spies.”

“Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.”

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

“Life is a struggle and a good spy goes in there and fights.”

“We all have a childhood dream that when there is love, everything goes like silk, but the reality is that marriage requires a lot of compromise.”

“adult life is full of hardship, childhood should be free of it.”