Every man, he said, carries his own pyre.

Pointing to the sandstone buildings around us, some of which had stood there for several hundreds of years, she commented on how old everything in Oxford looked. Can’t they afford anything new? she asked earnestly.

This is a miserable country, Zafar. I don’t need to explain that to you. It needs help. Isn’t it that simple?Is anything that simple?

Afghanistan’s barren, ragged desolation moaned a long dirge of ancient wonder, the earth’s broken features ready to receive fallen horsemen, the lost traveller, and all the butchered tribes.

To go from America’s founding belief that it can form an ever more perfect union to a belief that it can reconstruct another country in the image of its hopes for itself – to cover that distance – does not take long.

Afghanistan doesn’t have the oil of the Khazars, he said, and we’re not ready to prostitute our women like the Thais. Unlike the Westerner’s, ours is not a spiritual poverty but a material one. When our needs in that area are met, we will not have the dilemma or crisis of Western man.

Advisers were numberless in Kabul, like stray dogs in Mumbai.

What is the beginning of rage, the beginning of anger? Not dislike, but love.

You think people never say what they mean. The truth is, nine times out of ten what they say is all they mean.

No sight better expresses the politics of aid, the dynamics of the West and the developing countries, than the image of children, happy or in need.