Khaled Hosseini Quotes

You look pale, Soraya repeated, placing the stack of papers on the table.

of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

It was easier with Mother
always had been
less complicated, less treacherous. I didn't have to be on my guard so much. I didn't have to watch what I said all the time for fear of inflicting a wound. Being alone with her on those weekend getaways was like curling up into a soft cloud, and, for a couple of days, everything that had ever troubled me fell away, inconsequentially, a thousand miles below.

Today Baba got a blister when he put his palm down on the hood of our rental car! Mother had to put toothpaste on it.

Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can't breathe then, like someone's stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.

No one snaps our composure quite like someone we love.

I didn't know what the other guy was playing for, maybe just bragging rights. But this was my one chance to become someone who was looked at, not seen, listened to, not heard.

I will use a flower petal for paper,
And write you the sweetest letter,
You are the sultan of my heart,
Sultan of my heart.

What shall I tell you of the years that ensued? You know well the recent history of this beleaguered country. I need not to rehash for you those dark days. I tire at the mere thought of writing it, and, besides, the suffering of this country has already been sufficiently chronicled, and by pens far more learned and eloquent than mine.
I can sum it up in one word: war. Or rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain.

Was there happiness at the end [of the movie], they wanted to know.
If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn't know what to say.
Does anybody's?
After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Afghans like to say: Life goes on, undmindful of beginning, en, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis.

The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980s: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules.

Must have been quite the culture shock, going there."
"Yes it was." Idris doesn't say that the real culture shock has been in coming back.

Can't help but see the wariness, the effort, the impatience. I can't help but see two people together out of a sense of genetic duty, doomed already to bewilder and disappoint each other, each honor-bound to defy the other.

Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price?

Without women taking an active role in Afghan society, rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be very difficult.

I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and I am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost,grasping for breath.

For a time, I was quite literally at loss as to what to do with myself. For more than half a century I had looked after Suleiman.My daily existence had been shaped by his needs, his companionship. Now I was free to do as I wished, but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken from me. They say, find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and adrift.

But the fact is, I looked at my life and realized I already had what people sought in marriage.

How seamless seemed love and then came trouble!

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

It wasn't meant to be, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.

She was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home..

But time, it is like a charm. You never have as much as you think.

The reputation of a girl ... is a delicate thing. Like a mynah bird in your hands. slacken your grip and away it flies.

It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on.

My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters.

You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person.

At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.

Other Afghans from American, or from Europe," Amra says, "they come and take picture of her. They take video. They make promises. Then they go home and show their families. LIke she is zoo animal. I allow it because I think maybe they will help. But they forget. I never hear from them.

Dervish and a girl with limp blond hair were playing a lethargic

There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir

A person has to have a flaw somewhere.

Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you're breaithing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. Cut you have to breathe to scream. Panic.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.

You know nothing of courage." said Baba Ayub. "For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose." You have your life to lose, said the div. "You already took that from me.

I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle.

J'aurais du etre plus gentille - I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret.

I have heard it said we are the uninvited.
We are the unwelcome.
We should take our misfortune elsewhere.
But I hear your mother's voice,
over the tide.
and she whispers in my ear,
"Oh, but if they saw, my darling.
Even half of what you have.
If only they saw.
They would say kinder things, surely.

Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism

Give sustenance, Allah.
Give sustenance to me.

Maman had been a gifted writer. Pari has read every word Maman had written in French and every poem she had translated from Farsi as well. The power and beauty of her writing was undeniable. But if the account Maman had given of her life in the interview was a lie, then where did the images of her work come from? Where was the wellspring for words that were honest and lovely and brutal and sad? Was she merely a gifted trickster? A magician, with a pen for a wand, able to move an audience by conjuring emotions she had never known herself? Was that even possible?
Pari does not know - she does not know. And that, perhaps, may have been Maman's true intent, to shift the ground beneath Pari's feet. To intentionally unsteady and upend her, to turn her into a stranger to herself, to heave the weight of doubt on her mind, on all Pari thought she knew of her life, to make her feel as lost as if she were wandering through a desert at night, surrounded by darkness and the unknown, the truth elusive, like a single tiny glint of light in the distance flickering on and off, forever moving, receding.

I'll die if you go. The Jinn will come, and I'll have one of my fits. You'll see, I'll swallow my tongue and die. Don't leave me, Mariam jo. Please stay. I'll die if you go.

Sometimes a finger must be cut to save the hand.

Sometimes the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but that all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor.

... I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariam jo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that I let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so-called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps that is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariam jo. Forgive me, forgive me. Forgive me...

The only two places where I can read for long stretches are in airplanes and in bed at nighttime.

A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver

Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.

I noticed Wahid's boys, all three thin with dirt-caked faces and short-cropped brown hair under their skull caps, stealing furative glances at my digital wristwatch.

...I unsnapped the wristwatch and gave it to the youngest of the three boys. He muttered a sheepish "Tashakor."
"It tells you the time in any city in the world," I told him. The boys, nodding politely passing the watch between them, taking turns trying it on. But they lost interest and, soon the watch sat abandoned on the straw mat.

...I understood now why the boys hadn't shown any interest in the watch. They hadn't been staring at the watch at all. They'd been staring at my food.

Even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls

And if he knew, then what would I see if I did look in his eyes? Blame? Indignation? Or, God forbid, what I feared most: guileless devotion? That, most of all, I couldn't bear to see.

A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.

Big hazel eyes ... she had this laugh ... I can still hear it sometimes.

She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami was an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.

He had a face right out of film noir, a face meant to be shot in black and white, parallel shadows of venetian blinds slashing across it, a plume of cigarette smoke spiraling beside it.

But coming close wasn't the same as winning, was it? ... He had won because winners won and everyone else just went home

If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar.

He was also one of those boys so bursting with energy that he drained others of theirs.

In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.

Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings.

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.

I feel like we [americans] are a unique nation in this world, in that we are able to implement great change in our society over a relatively short period of time. What takes centuries in Europe, we accomplish in a generation.

War. Or, rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain. The names changed, as did the faces, and I spit on them equally for all the petty feuds, the snipers, the land mines, bombing raids, the rockets, the looting and raping and killing.

14-Just as he didn't understand why a wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream, always swept through him whenever he heard the jingling, surprising him each time like an unexpected gust of wind. But then it passes, as all things do, it passed

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.

It was you Nabi. It was always you. Didn't you know?

It was God's fault, for taunting her as He had. For not granting her what He had granted so many other women. For dangling before her, tantalizingly, what He knew would give her the greatest happiness, then pulling it away.

That was when I learned that, in America, you don't reveal the ending of the movie, and if you do, you will be scorned and made to apologize profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.

People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections.

I promised myself that I would talk to her before the summer was over, but schools reopened, the leaves reddened, yellowed, and fell, the rains of winter swept in and wakened Baba's joints, baby leaves sprouted once more, and I still hadn't had the heart, the dil, to even look her in the eye.

I spent a lot of winters in my childhood flying kites with my brother, with my cousins, with friends in the neighborhood. It's what we did in the winter. Schools close down. There was not much to do.

She is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.

My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write.

Inside Laila too a battle was being waged : guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never see each other again.

What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.

11-His days in Shadbagh were numbered, like Shuja's. He knew this now. There was nothing left for him here. He had no home here. He would wait until winter passed and the spring thaw set in, and he would rise one morning before dawn and he would step out the door. He would choose a direction and he would begin to walk. He would walk as far from Shadbagh as his feet would take him. And if one day, trekking across some vast open field, despair should take hold of him, he would stop in his tracks and shut his eyes and he would think of the falcon feather Pari had found in the desert. He would picture the feather coming loose from the bird, up in the clouds, half a mile above the world, twirling and spinning in violent currents, hurled by gusts of blustering wind across miles and miles of desert and mountains, to finally land, of all places and against all odds, at the foot of that one boulder for his sister to find. It would strike him with wonder, then, and hope too, that such things happened, And though he would know better, he would take heart, and he would open his eyes, and walk.

I brought Hassan's son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that the answers may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting, chalk scribbles away. "Nothing like life, in other words," he said. "There, it's questions with either no answers or messy ones.

Mostly, though, I dream of good things ... I dream that flowers will bloom in the streets..again and music will play in the ... houses and kites will fly in the skies.

America was different. America was a river, roarng along, unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.

I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.

You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is ... God help him.

Marriage can wait, education cannot.

If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story.

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

I remember how I would eye with envy all the kids in our neighborhood, in my school, who had a little brother or sister. How bewildered I was by the way some of them treated each other, oblivious to their own good luck. They acted like wild dogs. Pinching, hitting, pushing, betraying one another any way they could think of. Laughing about it too. They wouldn't speak to one another. I didn't understand. Me, I spent most of my early years craving a sibling. What I really wished I had was a twin, someone who'd cried next to me in the crib, slept beside me, fed from Mother's breast with me. Someone to love helplessly and totally, and in whose face I could always find myself.

Blood is a powerful thing

I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.

I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.