I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t. - Khaled Hosseini

and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.