A Thousand Splendid Suns: Key Quotes

The Treatment of Women

“Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”
“A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated…”
“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”

“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
“A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed, it won’t stretch to make room for you.”

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
“She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she’d said.”

“…every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet…people find a way to survive, to go on.”
“Her survival was the single clearest act of defiance of her life.”

“Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”
“Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.”

“She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami was an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.”
“We’re not in the business of charity here, Mariam. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals all the details for itself.”
“Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”

“Babi said it was up to the patient, given the nonspecific nature of Jekyll and Hyde’s. One could argue that the patient has power over the people around them, since they affect the mood everyone else is in. Or one could say that the people around the patient are in control, since the patient has to take his cues from them after each episode.”
“To me, it’s nonsense-and very dangerous nonsense at that-all this talk of I’m Tajik and you’re Pashtun and he’s Hazara and she’s Uzbek. We’re all Afghans, and that’s all that should matter.”