Top 80 Nadia Hashimi Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

4. “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

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

— Nadia Hashimi

6. “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

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

— Nadia Hashimi

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Nadia Hashimi

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

22. “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

23. “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

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

— Nadia Hashimi

25. “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

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

— Nadia Hashimi

27. “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

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

31. “That’s what being a mother is, isn’t it? Waiting for a rounded belly to tighten in readiness; listening for the sound of hunger in the moonlit hours; hearing an eager voice call even in the camouflage of traffic, loud music, and whirring machines. It’s looking at every door, every phone, and every approaching silhouette and feeling that slight lift, that tickle of opportunity to be again – mother.”

— Nadia Hashimi

32. “Grudges don’t die – people do.”

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi

37. “I’d watched my grandmother tend to her plants, pruning one stem at a time, and checking the soil’s moisture with a finger. Like her plants, she bloomed with the sun and wouldn’t even draw the curtains in her home. How could this dark hole be her path to heaven?”

— Nadia Hashimi

38. “It’s time to undo Rahim.”

— Nadia Hashimi

39. “It’s an inside-out world, isn’t it? Sometimes the world turns inside out and we are in the center and it’s oh-so-dark and we think we will never, ever see the sun again.”

— Nadia Hashimi

40. “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

41. “That was her escape, I realized. Where her body couldn’t take her, her mind went.”

— Nadia Hashimi

42. “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

43. “What he wanted to say was that two thousand years of peace could be undone in a month of war.”

— Nadia Hashimi

44. “You’ve got the Russians and the Americans trying to be best buddies with the Afghan government. Two muscle-flexing superpowers playing tug-of-war, and they shredded this country to pieces.”

— Nadia Hashimi

45. “She would be brave because her father had once told her that the world lived within her. That her bones were made of mountains. That rivers coursed through her veins. That her heartbeat was the sound of a thousand pounding hooves. That her eyes glittered with the light of a starry sky. I am that girl, and this is my story.”

— Nadia Hashimi

46. “He did not live in fear of God because, he reasoned, a merciful God would not create us only to punish us for trivial earthly matters.”

— 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. “People are God’s cruelest creations. They’ll step on the smallest of backs to feel an inch taller.”

— Nadia Hashimi

49. “Even righteousness is an ambiguous thing.”

— Nadia Hashimi

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

— Nadia Hashimi