"Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob
on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it"
"That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. "
"With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world
around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the
world in black and white.
And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love
a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating
him a little."
"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 father. When you tell a lie, you steal
someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to
fairness."
"I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good." "You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing
because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about
it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes
with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is.. God help
him."
"Sometimes, Soraya sleeping next to me, I lay in bed a listened to the
screen door swinging open and shut in the breeze, to the crickets
chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s
womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our
marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late
at night, in the darkness of the room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya
and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.”
