I used to climb mountains a lot; I decided to go to Pakistan to climb K2, the world's second-highest mountain. I didn't get quite to the top.

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.

If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.

My father ended up starting the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, which is on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. My mother started a school.

In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.

Slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.

If you really want to change a culture... empower women.

You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.

When your kids accomplish something it means much more than anything you've done.

Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.' Sign in Skardu

In darkness there is death.

As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul.

The body becomes stronger as its members become healthier. The whole church of God gains when the members that compose it begin to seek a better and a higher life.

I love writers who are insightful enough to be cynical but choose not to be.

Gaia spins on, silently contemplating what it means to be born into a sarcastic universe.

I like digital cameras, because they enable you to reminisce immediately.

Because you aren't who you think you are. You aren't what everyone else believes. You might have delivered countless deaths but you love more fiercely than anyone I've ever known.

This is illegal. If you don't let me out, you'll be arrested. I swear you will. You'll go to prison and be forced to have intimate relations with a man named Butch. Let. Me. Out.

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.