A Thousand Splendid Suns

"Grief is a luxury we cannot afford when survival is at stake."

"You see, some people, if you can take their joy from them, they're reduced to half of what they were."

"Women like us, we endure. It's all we know."

"The streets of Kabul held her story, and she would return to tell it."

"Life had been cruel to her, but she would not be cruel to herself."

"She would not let the past steal her future."

"I choose to remember the good things. It is the only way forward."

"She had never known she was capable of such strength."

"She had lived so long in shadow that the light seemed unbearable."

"The war had taken many things from her, but it could not take her will."

"I finally knew what it felt like to matter to someone."

"She would walk the streets of this city as a woman unchained."

"Forgiveness was not something she could give. Not yet."

"She had become someone's mother, and in that lay a purpose she had never known."

"I will not be a slave in my own home."

"She thought of her life in the hut, how she had lived on the margins of the world."

"Maybe all of us have things we despise about ourselves. Maybe we all wish we could be other than what we are."

"If you're afraid of your reflection in the water, you should not look at it."

"We're going to get out of here, Mariam. I promise."

"Perhaps this is just how it has to be. Perhaps this is the life that has been written for me."

"I didn't know that the world could be so dark."

"Do you ever think, Laila, that maybe we've been women too long?"

"I wish you wouldn't say things like that. It makes me sad."

"You're like a mountain here, Mariam. This place wouldn't exist without you."

"But she supposed she had always wanted to know what it felt like to be important to someone."

"There is no power on Earth that can undo what was done."

"Suffering and love were like that, she thought. They were like a single thing."

"I am like that, Mariam thought. Like a compass needle. Except I have no place to point to."

"Endure, she said. Endure."

"A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing."