Top 239 Quotes & Sayings by Afghani Authors - Page 3

Afghan people are just so tired of war.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

There's nothing easy about writing. It's always difficult. It's always a struggle.

Believe in God, for with the grace of God the American rockets will go astray and we will be saved.

My parents tried to sell me. I was looking for a way to share my feelings, so I started to rap to talk about the painful experience of being a girl.

I have a strange - because there's no other way probably of describing it - uh, temper. I'm a very difficult taskmaster. I don't wait.

It is my conviction that becoming economically and socially vulnerable puts you at the mercy of people surrounding you. It is as if you no longer exist as a human being and are no longer worthy of respect.

I want to go back to my country to help other girls. We need to support girls to see other possibilities for themselves, to have a vision for their own future.

It means so much to me that my family went against our tradition for me.

The privileged elites are part of the globalization moment that we live in.

My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write.

I have a pretty big fund-raising heart.

Pathology by Daesh is distinctively to swallow its opponents, to frighten the population. In that regard, the threat is very real.

We must focus on our biggest enemy, poverty. There is no single-state solution to it, and that is a noble goal.

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.

I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the world moves towards something messier and more complicated, and once it does you can never go back.

I've learned things about the craft of writing and about structuring a book and about character development and so on that I've just learned on the fly.

It's a very nice kind of quasi-fame being a writer, because you remain largely anonymous and you can have a private life, which I really cherish. I don't like to be in the public light all that much. I don't crave the whole fame thing at all.

A doctor in a hospital told me that when the mujaheddin were fighting in the early Nineties, he often performed amputations and Caesarean sections without anesthesia because there were no supplies.

The biggest change of my life was coming to America.

The first principle of tackling corruption is that you do not engage in it and you have the will to confront it.

I never thought what I wrote was good enough to be published. I thought of myself as completely detached from that constellation of real writers. It was completely for myself.

The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

We develop sentiments that we are only going to work with people like us. But you don't build up a nation by working with people like you. You overcome a history of conflict by reaching out to people very much unlike you.

You know, America has profoundly shaped me, and I have two American children and unbelievably rich friendships so it will always be a source of joy and good memories.

Time is not a friend.

Being a rapper as a woman is not a good thing in Afghanistan. I kind of put my life in danger whenever I go somewhere to talk about women's rights or make music, rap, or have interviews.

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.

Life just doesn't care about our aspirations, or sadness. It's often random, and it's often stupid and it's often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.

No power in the country can dissolve the government.

Deadlines concentrate the mind. But deadlines should not be dogmas.

In 2001, we didn't have an army; we had remnants of a dissolved army that had no hope. Our generals had literally become busboys.

My books never go where I think they're going.

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

The thing with 'Alphas' is that, even though it's sci-fi, I run into lots of people that have watched the show for various reasons. They're like, 'I had no expectation, and I'm totally blown away and fascinated.'

In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

We don't consider the battle has ended in Afghanistan... The battle has begun and its fires are picking up. These fires will reach the White House, because it is the center of injustice and tyranny.

I didn't want kabobs, Afghan music, and rules that required girls to be carefully monitored. I wanted mac and cheese, country music, and independence.

I saw my friends being beaten because they said no to child marriage.

The Western media has depicted the Afghan woman as a helpless, weak individual. I have said it before, and I shall repeat it: The Afghan woman is strong. The Afghan woman is resourceful. The Afghan woman is resilient.

When I'm rapping, I become very emotional, and people can feel it through my face.

I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.

President Karzai was an accidental president. There was no paradigm for the conditions he faced, because no one could have imagined 9/11. He had to improvise under very difficult conditions to hold this country together.

Even at an early age, I rebelled against my strict upbringing. When I was 9, I built myself a 'make-out fort' in our backyard from wood, filled it with candy, and invited my blond, blue-eyed neighbor over to kiss.

I am an activist and rapper from Afghanistan, and I use rap to speak out and help end child marriage.

I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.

When my mother told me they have to sell me, I couldn't breathe; I couldn't speak.

Afghanistan's geographical location gives it the opportunity to become one of the biggest transit routes in the region. It can connect Southern, Eastern and Central Asia to the Middle East.

When the Taliban was ruling Afghanistan, women were not allowed to go to school, to work, or even leave the house without a male chaperone. The greatest moment was when that ended.

When I was a little girl, I did not listen to music much. I did not think that one day I would become a rapper. I was born in a very traditional and religious family. Being a female was destroying my dreams. Slowly, first through poetry and then music, I began to find ways to share my thoughts and feelings, talk to my family and to the world.

You cannot have good terrorists and bad terrorists.

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.

I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S.

I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.

I learned how to speak English watching television.

I - and, I suspect, millions of Americans like me, Republicans and Democrats alike - couldn't care less about Obama's middle name or the ridiculous six-degrees-of-separation game that is the William Ayers non-issue.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

If I get elected, my government will promote a culture of acceptance and non-violence in the country.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.