If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.

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.

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

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.

The place where music and worship meet is like a divine mystery of sorts.

the rain in this room is low and thickand undressing my heart through the air. – intimacy

It's far too late for anything but magick, as the future is clearly up for grabs.

The dangerous assumption we unknowingly accept in the American dream is that our greatest asset is our own ability.

Could I use some butter and cheese and eggs in my cooking without going down some kind of hippie shame spiral? Yes. Of course I could.

I can't tell you how much I respect all the single parents out there doing it all solo.

Unless liberty flourishes in all lands, it cannot flourish in one.

I live out in the country now and it's quiet and it's a place where I can think a lot.

If me and King Kong went into an alley, only one of us would come out. And it wouldn't be the monkey.

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.