Top 80 Nadia Hashimi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life has typhoons. They come and turn everything upside down. But you still have to standup because the next storm may be around the corner.”

— Nadia Hashimi

2. “Refugees didn’t just escape a place. They had to escape a thousand memories until they’d put enough time and distance between them and their misery to wake to a better day.”

— Nadia Hashimi

3. “Our months were named after constellations, and soon it would be the month of Saur, or Taurus. I drew lines between stars and saw the bull’s swordlike horns piercing the sky. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled to picture the giant beast leaping down from the heavens and galloping on this land.”

— Nadia Hashimi

4. “The hell with naseeb. Naseeb is what people blame for every thing they can’t fix.”

— Nadia Hashimi

5. “What a burden it is to be born a woman.”

— Nadia Hashimi

6. “You need no one to confirm you. You are everything you believe yourself to be.”

— Nadia Hashimi

7. “The elderly become invisible sooner than we would hope.”

— Nadia Hashimi

8. “There could be nothing worse than choosing between two children. Ask me to choose between my right arm and my left and I will give you one. But ask me to choose between two of my children and my heart shatters into a thousand pieces.”

— Nadia Hashimi

9. “But times change. Everything changes. Birds fly away, one by one.”

— Nadia Hashimi

10. “I crossed scorched earth for the second time in my life, unsure if it would be my spirit or my knees to buckle first. Unsure which fire would shape my destiny and which would burn me. Unsure if what I was running toward was any better than what I was running from.”

— Nadia Hashimi

11. “The person who doesn’t appreciate the apple, doesn’t appreciate the orchard.”

— Nadia Hashimi

12. “When things are rough, people look for an escape. A way out. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right way.”

— Nadia Hashimi

13. “Have you forgotten the words of Rumi? ‘You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.’ I had never truly given myself over to those words until this moment. The thought of the ocean inside me, with its infinite drops ran through me like a charge. My existence was integral to the universe.”

— Nadia Hashimi

14. “What is gone is gone and will not come back. When the earth swallows, it swallows forever and we are left to stumble along feeling the absences. These are our burdens.”

— Nadia Hashimi

15. “Love grows wildest in the gardens of hardship.”

— Nadia Hashimi

16. “Funny, isn’t it? We hear the same name and while they see dark, I see light.”

— Nadia Hashimi

17. “You know, we’re so damned afraid that talking about the ones we’ve lost will hurt us as much as losing them did. So we just stop talking about them. But that’s when we truly lose them.”

— Nadia Hashimi

18. “Poor girl. She ran out from under a leaking roof and sat in the rain.”

— Nadia Hashimi

19. “Shekiba-e-shola? Are you joking? He’ll take one look at her and come after us demanding twice what we owe!”

— Nadia Hashimi

20. “Let people serve you information, but never let them serve you your opinion.”

— Nadia Hashimi

21. “This life is difficult. We lose fathers, brothers, mothers, songbirds and pieces of ourselves. Whips strike the innocent, honors go to the guilty, and there is too much loneliness. I would be a fool to pray for my children to escape all of that. Ask for too much and it might actually turn out worse. But I can pray for small things, like fertile fields, a mother’s love, a child’s smile – a life that’s less bitter than sweet.”

— Nadia Hashimi

22. “People who are beset by tragedy once and twice are sure to grieve again. Fate finds it easier to retrace its treads.”

— Nadia Hashimi

23. “But her personality made her glow. People looked at her and couldn’t help but smile.”

— Nadia Hashimi

24. “Afghanistan’s secret weapon has always been her women.”

— Nadia Hashimi

25. “An Afghan carpet, perhaps by design, conceals blood just as well as it conceals spilled tea.”

— Nadia Hashimi

26. “Afghanistan’s secret weapon has always been her women. But, Boba, I’m just a girl. What a thing to say! As if a girl is made of lesser materials. Have you forgotten the words of Rumi? You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

— Nadia Hashimi

27. “He believes that people have destroyed religion and religion has destroyed people. He says he believes in God, but he doesn’t believe in people.”

— Nadia Hashimi

28. “We are too shortsighted to rejoice in the moments that deserve it.”

— Nadia Hashimi

29. “On education – Every bit does some good. I’m lucky I know how to read. It’s a candle in a dark room. What I don’t know, I can find out for myself. It’s easier to fool someone who can’t figure things out on his own.”

— Nadia Hashimi

30. “Some things are clearer from a distance.”

— Nadia Hashimi

31. “I knew nothing of that kind of love. I knew nothing about pearls and shells either except that one had to free itself from the other. We were both calmer than we should have been, Benafsha because she had lived her love, and me because I had never known it.”

— Nadia Hashimi

32. “It’s never easy to leave one’s home, especially when there are only closed doors ahead of you.”

— Nadia Hashimi

33. “As children inch their way into adolescence, the parent changes. He is an authority, a source of answers, and a chastising voice. Depending on the day, he may be resented, emulated, questioned, or defied. Only as an adult can a child imagine his parent as a whole person, as a husband, a brother, or a son. Only then can a child see how his parent fits into the world beyond four walls.”

— Nadia Hashimi

34. “She moved as if she didn’t know her age.”

— Nadia Hashimi

35. “Grief is nothing but the far brink of love. Love is the sun; grief is the shadow it casts. Love is an opera; grief is its echo. You cannot have one without the other. But if you follow that grief, you will find your way back to love.”

— Nadia Hashimi

36. “Forty days. What was so magical about forty? I wondered. Was I to feel differently today than I did yesterday? Was I to forget what happened just six weeks ago? We Afghans marked both life and death with a forty-day period, as if we needed that much time to confirm either had truly happened. We had celebrated Jahangir’s birth forty days after he’d left my womb, unsure if this child was here with us to stay. And now his death. Forty days of praying, alone, with others and everything in between.”

— Nadia Hashimi

37. “Sometimes the storm in a person’s mind raged too strongly.”

— Nadia Hashimi

38. “That is the problem with gifts, Madar-jan. They are always given away.”

— Nadia Hashimi

39. “Sometimes it’s when people are silent that you hear them most clearly.”

— Nadia Hashimi

40. “The human spirit, you know what they say about the human spirit? Is is harder than a rock and more delicate than a flower petal.”

— Nadia Hashimi

41. “My best friend was the kind of daughter mothers wanted, one who would wear prim dresses and pearls. She could sit for hours without making a peep and didn’t go home with muddy knees, as I did.”

— Nadia Hashimi

42. “But being without a mother is like being stripped naked and thrown into the snow.”

— Nadia Hashimi

43. “Her father read a prayer over the mound of dirt and they looked at each other, quietly wondering which of them would join the others first.”

— Nadia Hashimi

44. “We were pressed against each other, a husband and wife bound together not by marriage, but by the harmony of our hearts. Death could not undo us, I’d learned. My hamsar was with me still. He would watch over us, my beloved husband, as we made our way into tomorrow.”

— Nadia Hashimi

45. “Can a mother commit a greater sin than ignoring her intuitions?”

— Nadia Hashimi

46. “In that way, Shekiba was Afghanistan. Beginning in her childhood, tragedy and malice chipped away at her until she was just a fragment of the person she should have been.”

— Nadia Hashimi

47. “I’ve never thought it was safe for me to bring a child into this world, not with all my sharp edges and dark corners. I accepted long ago that I would be an endling, the last of my kind.”

— Nadia Hashimi

48. “Some truths need to be said out loud before they can be believed.”

— Nadia Hashimi

49. “But sometimes you have to act out of line, I suppose. Sometimes you have to take a chance if you want something badly enough.”

— Nadia Hashimi

50. “A conversation began to take shape between us. A conversation that happened in unspoken words, in false words, in knowing glances.”

— Nadia Hashimi