Malala Yousafzai · 240 pages
Rating: (12.6K votes)
“What a strange world it was when a girl who wanted to go to school had to defy militants with machine guns - as well as her own family.”
“Perhaps that's because I do not remember a thing about the shooting. Not a single thing. The doctors and nurses offered complicated explanations for why I didn't recall the attack. They said the brain protects us from memories that are too painful to remember. Or, they said, my brain might have shut down as soon as I was injured. I love science, and I love nothing more than asking question upon question to figure out the way things work. But I don't need science to figure out why I don't remember the attack. I know why: God is kind to me.”
“If you help someone in need you might also receive unexpected aid.”
“I might have been calm, but my dear father was near tears. 'Are you all right, jani?' he said. 'Aba,' I said, trying to reassure him. 'Everybody knows they will die someday. No one can stop death. It doesn't matter if it comes from a Talib or from cancer.”
“I would run to rejoin the children. Especially when it was time for the kite-flying contests- where the boys would skilfully try to cut down their competitors' kite strings. It plunges. It was beautiful, and also a bit melancholy for me to see the pretty kites sputter to the ground.
Maybe it was because I could see a future that would be cut down just like those kites- simply because I was a girl.”
“As I watched my brothers run up to the roof to launch their kites, I wondered how free I could ever really be.”
“I had grown up hearing the word terrorism, but I never really understood what it meant. Until now. Terrorism is different from war-where soldiers face one another in battle. Terrorism is fear all around you. It is going to sleep at night and not knowing what horrors the next day will bring.”
“At the time, it seemed to me that Jeremy was spending a lot of time with a piece of plastic pressed against his ear, talking to himself. Which was fine by me. We all have our eccentricities. Jeremy liked talking to plastic; I liked hunting and eating the rats that ventured into the motel room. Or, at least I did like hunting and eating the rats, until Jeremy caught me and promptly kiboshed that hobby. Some of us are less tolerant of eccentricities than others.”
“I believe that every experience, every wrong decision, teaches us something. That’s why we shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes.”
“Cabel calls Captain.
Komisky."
Sir, any chance Janie and I can be seen together now?"
Under the circumstances, that would pretty damn much make my day, yes. Besides, the Wilder cocaine case got settled on Monday. He pleaded guilty."
You rock, sir."
Yes, yes, I know. Go out to a movie or something, will you?"
Right away. Thank you."
And stop bothering me.”
“Let's put it to a vote. Shall the ballots be open or secret?"
"We don't need Soviet-style voting," Charushnikov said, offended. "Let's vote the honest way, the European way: secret ballots.”
“If you were sitting quietly on your couch, waiting for your girlfriend to come back inside so you could finish watching your movie, and while you were waiting, someone called you up and said “I’ll give you a million dollars if you can guess what’s going to happen next,” you absolutely would not guess “I am going to be brutally and unexpectedly attacked by a goose in my own home.” Even if you had a hundred guesses, you would not guess that.”
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