And The Mountains Echoed Quotes
"You want a story and I will tell you one. But just the one."
"Life in Maidan Sabz was hard for all its inhabitants."
"Baba Ayub counted himself among the fortunate because he had a family that he cherished above all things."
"He loved his wife and never raised his voice to her, much less his hand."
"Out of the children’s earshot, Baba Ayub and his wife debated what they should do."
"No parent should have to make a choice such as this."
"He didn’t work, didn’t pray, hardly ate."
"His remaining sons had to take over his work, for every day Baba Ayub did nothing but sit at the edge of his field."
"You have your life to lose, said the div."
"Your son does not remember you, the div continued."
"The potion that erased these memories? It was Baba Ayub’s reward for passing the div’s second test."
"She was the only person in the world who would never, could never, hurt him."
"Father, whose face was all but lost to him now."
"Father, whose hands were scarred, whose face was crosshatched with deep lines of weariness."
"But when she saw a thin figure approaching Maidan Sabz from the direction of the mountains, her heart leapt with joy."
"Father sat down by the remains of the fire."
"Father looked at him, but in the dark his face dissolved into an expression Abdullah couldn’t make out."
"He felt as though he had stepped into the div’s palace."
"A Rumi poem, one from Mullah Shekib’s teachings."
"He is the family’s success story, perhaps the entire village’s too."
"So when are you going to show me around Kabul again, brother?"
"At the gardens of Babur, he had lifted Masooma from the front seat of the car and carried her in his arms to the site of the Mughal emperor’s tomb."
"Soon, Inshallah," Nabi says, tapping a finger against the cup.
"I loved Kabul. If I could, I’d march all the way there first thing tomorrow."
"It blistered the eyes, beauty like hers."
"Be happy, Parwana, please be happy. Do it for me."
"I need to tell you, if only this once, that I have loved you a long, long time, Nabi. Please don’t be angry."
"Don’t stay for me. This is what I’m saying, Nabi. Don’t stay for me."
"I had stayed initially because Suleiman needed me, because he was wholly dependent on me."
"I looked at my life and realized I already had what people sought in marriage."
"Wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain."
"I lived those days already, and I intend to relive them on these pages as briefly as possible."
"The only good I took from that time was a measure of vindication about little Pari, who by now must have grown into a young woman."
"You have left behind your country, your friends, your family, and you have come here to this godforsaken city to help my homeland and my countrymen. How could I profit off you?"
"I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse."
"The only thing worse than blindness is being the only one who can see."
"The task of bearing witness, of remembering, is an endless one."
"I think I might have blacked out for a minute or two. Sit down, Pari. You’re looming over me."
"That boy? He said that? Le petit salaud. What does he know? His breath still smells of his mother’s tit."
"I’m tired, Pari. You can scold me another time. The whipping post isn’t going anywhere."
"Now it is a different story. Naturally, we are preparing for presidential elections, but it is a different story."
"I know a sad little fairy who was blown away by the wind one night."
"You’re lucky, Pari. You won’t have to work as hard for men to take you seriously. They’ll pay attention to you."
"I don’t know where she gets the ability. All those incomprehensible formulas and theories."
"I look around the apartment again and am drawn to a framed photograph on one of the bookshelves."
"A mother needs her sons in order to recover. Yes, but she needs her daughters too."
"I did not care for his notion of respectable. I did not desire to slip the leash around my own neck."
"It’s important for the fortunate, for people like us, to live up to their responsibilities."
"No one on this earth matters to me more than you, Adel. You are my son."
"The people in this town, they need me, Adel. They need my help to have a home and find work and make a livelihood."
"I would gladly give up all of this for you. I would give up my life for you, son."
"People always disappoint Mamá in the end, me included."
"The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck."
"It’s a mistake to give [them love]. They can’t accept it. They can’t accept the very thing they’re needing."
"But really they’re all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage."
"People learned to live with the most unimaginable things."
"The net effect is that she has made me feel vaguely reprimanded and, what’s more, deserving of it, guilty of wrongs unspoken, offenses I’ve never been formally charged with."
"It’s only the best-selling thirty-five millimeter in the world for the last thirty years."
"A little island within the greater one."
"We’re going to pay your father a visit, Maddie. And I start begging. I worried he was going to kill us both."
"The more she said it, the more he sobbed, until it exhausted him and at some point he fell asleep on his mother’s lap."
"But he won’t hear it. We walk right up to the door and there’s my father, in the doorway, and Odie raises the barrel and shoves it against his chin and says, Do it again and I will come back and shoot you in the face with this rifle."
"They’re all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage."
"The closest he had ever come to manual labor was one afternoon three years ago when he’d helped the gardener plant a few apple saplings in the backyard of their house in Kabul."
That’s not a camera is," she said, "a black box with a hole to let in the light and something to absorb the light. Give me the needle.
"Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly."
"But really what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want."
"If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside."
"Because I am too happy and too excited."
"What I remember, it is not his face or his voice. Only that in my life something has been missing always. Something good. Something... Ah, I don't know what to say. That is all."
"I remember almost nothing about him. What I remember, it is not his face or his voice. Only that in my life something has been missing always."
"And so Baba’s little sister, Pari, was my secret companion, invisible to everyone but me."
"Sometimes I could almost see her—really see her, I mean—just at the periphery of my eyesight."
"It was this: that my mother would never leave me. This was her gift to me, the ironclad knowledge that she would never do to me what Madaline had done to Thalia."
"The whole time we talked like this, a fantasy played out in my head. In it, I would save all my money, not spend a dollar on candy or stickers, and when my piggy bank was full... I would break it open and pocket all the money and set out to find my father’s little sister, wherever she was, and, when I did, I would buy her back and bring her home to Baba. I would make my father happy."
"They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under."
"This is the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself."
"I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back."
"I felt a soft lurch in my chest, the muffled thump of another heart kick-starting anew next to my own."
"I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath."
"Everything about this city is. I feel wonder at the clarity of the air, at the wind swooping down on the river, making the water slap against the stony banks, at how full and rich the light is and how it seems to shine from every direction."
"I don’t know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me."
"Her words tug at my childhood longings. I remember how when I felt lonely, I would whisper her name—our name—and hold my breath, waiting for an echo, certain that it would come someday."
"I was the lucky one because I was protected by my youth. Je pouvais oublier. I still had the luxury of forgetting. He did not."
"I am not alone. A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope."