- Karla once said (546)
Foreigners were stared at in India. Somewhere in the five or more millenia of its history, the culture had decided to dispense with the casual, nonchalant glance. By the time I came to Bombay, the eye contact ranged from an ogling gaze to a gawping, goggled-eyed glated. There was nothing malicious in it. The starting eyes that found and followed me everywhere I went were innocent, curious, and almost always friendly.
- Don't even bother trying to deny it :) (549)
Kaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mighn't be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that i've done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration. What i do know now, and didn't know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, its the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemptions climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.
- Lin, on his attempts to help Anand too late (563)
Its okay, Karla once said, because if we learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn't need love at all.
- Karla once said (588)
Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer.
- I'm not sure what he means by a "kind of prayer" (595)
I told Prabhakar, sitting in his cab and watching him cry, that love makes men big, and hate makes them small. I told him that my little friend was one of the biggest men i ever met because there wasn't any hate in him.
- Lin soothing Prabhakars performance anxiety (601)
Kaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we're halfway to wisdom. I hope he wasn't right about that. I hope good envy takes you further than that, because a lifetime has passed since that day at the wire, and I still envy Anand's calm communion with fate, and long for it with all my flawed and striving heart.
- Lin after meeting Anand in the Arthur Road jail (607)
At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them , even after they're dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabhakar. And sometimes my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.
- Losing Prabhakar (629)
A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fates gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them.
- Lin's loneliness after losing Abdullah and Prabhakar at the same time (633)
All horse good, all man not good
- Nazeer, with the truest words ever spoken (658)
Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong -- that we do not lie to ourselves and convince ourselves that what we do is right.
- One of the key theorems in Abdul Kader Khan's Theory of Resolution (709)
"These afghans may not be the best men in the world to live with...but they are certainly the best men in the world to die with"
- Ahmed Zadeh, grateful for the undaunted spirit of the Afghan Mujaheddin (716)
It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.
- Lin, learning Kader would not have freed him from jail earlier than was convenient (737)
They'd lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn't like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness.....Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: its a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.
- Lin's steps closer to figuring life out, while his illusions come crashing down (740)
Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then , what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women.
- Lin, the day before his attempted exit from Afghanistan(741)
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