As a woman, you accept the situation, adapt to it, and do your best, whereas men would choose violence.

As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.

I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

I was thinking, there are 5 million people, and I am just one of those 5 million. In the build-up to the war you see children playing in the street, and you think, ah, I'm going to be okay.

We have believing in this innocent feeling of nothing will ever happen to us, because all catastrophes always broad and happening to anyone else.

When I decided to stay in Iraq, I decided to take the fear out of my body and put it into a freezer.

If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan.

If I leave, reality will devour me. Then they will all really be dead.

If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's okay to write.

I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.

But what reality was ever made by realists?

every loss, every mistake, was seared into her soul, creating a different kind of tattoo, one made from rage and abandonment, heart break and tears

I don't think about a role as positive or negative. If I can play it convincingly, then I feel satisfied as an actor

To the union of all honest men.

The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers... It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.

Marriage is nature's way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.

You know, I love traveling and I love being exposed to different cultures, but really it's the people that I've met along the way, not the places I've been, that have opened my eyes.

We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

I'm divorced and I've been to the circus and seen the clowns. This ain't my first rodeo.

Emotionally, a person is tied to the land of his birth. It's only human.