Khaled Hosseini Quotes

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly. ~ Khaled Hosseini

... 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... ~ Khaled Hosseini

You can not stop you from being who you are. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Theft is the one unforgivable sin, the one common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched then stealing. ~ Khaled Hosseini

It's a half bridge, really, as only four of its original arches remain. It ends midway across the river. Like it reached, tried to reunite with, the other side and fell short. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Air grew heavy, damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which sometimes played old Pashto songs were played, time stretched and contracted depending on his absence or presence. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine. Held for a moment. Flew away. ~ Khaled Hosseini

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life ... you steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a ather. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness ... there is no act more wretched than stealing. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks. ~ Khaled Hosseini

It was the way Nana uttered the word - not so much saying it as spitting it at her - that made Mariam feel the full sting of it. ~ Khaled Hosseini

For you, a thousand times over ~ Khaled Hosseini

And here she was now, over those boulders and parched hills, with a home of her own, a husband of her own, heading toward on final, cherished province: Motherhood. How delectable it was to think of this baby, her baby, their baby. How glorious it was to know that her love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being, to know that there was no need any longer for pebble games. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll's head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila's salvation.
The little girl looks up. Puts the doll down. Smiles. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

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

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

I was glad I didn't have to return his gaze. Did he know I knew? 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? ~ Khaled Hosseini

And, just like that, he had thrown at me his own little test. If I was going to toy with him and challenge his loyalty, then he would toy with me, test my integrity. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Give sustenance, Allah.
Give sustenance to me. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

She had this laugh. I swear it's why I married her, Laila, for that laugh! It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin! ~ Khaled Hosseini

She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than i did the sun for shining on me. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become. ~ Khaled Hosseini

In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

I loved wintertime in Kabul. I loved it for the soft pattering of snow against
my window at night, for the way fresh snow crunched under my black rubber boots,
for the warmth of the cast-iron stove as the wind screeched through the yards,
the streets. But mostly because, as the trees froze and ice sheathed the roads,
the chill between Baba and me thawed a little. And the reason for that was the
kites. Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of
existence. Kites were the one paper thin slice of intersection between those
spheres. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her. ~ Khaled Hosseini

- She studies mathematics at the Sorbonne.
...
- Perhaps it's her way of rebelling. You know a thing or two about rebellion, I think.
- Yes, but I did it in the proper way. I drank and smoked and took lovers. Who rebells with mathematics? ~ Khaled Hosseini

It's a funny thing ... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. ~ Khaled Hosseini

But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world. ~ Khaled Hosseini

She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How shr could ever cope with his permanent absence? ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart ~ Khaled Hosseini

Of you ask me for more. It's late, and we have a long day of travel ahead of us, Pari, you and I. You will need your sleep tonight. And you too, Abdullah. ~ Khaled Hosseini

To me, families are puzzles that take a lifetime to work out - or not, as often is the case - and I like to explore how people within them try to connect, be it through love, duty, or circumstance. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I just think these people, everything they've been through, we should respect them ... By 'we', I mean people like Timur and me. The lucky ones, the ones who weren't here when the place was getting bombed to hell. We're not like these people. We shouldn't pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we're not entitled to them ... I'm rambling. ~ Khaled Hosseini

For some people, particularly women, marriage-even an unhappy one such as this-is an escape from even greater unhappiness. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I do it for the girls."

"What girls?"

He smirked. "They think it's sexy."

"It's not."

"No?"

"I assure you."

"Not sexy?"

"You look khila, like a half-wit."

"That hurts," he said.

"What girls anyway?"

"You're jealous."

"I'm indifferently curious."

"You can't be both." He took another drag and squinted through the smoke. "I'll bet they're talking about us now."

In Laila's head, Mammy's voice rang out. Like a mynah bird in your hands. Slacken your grip and away it flies. Guilt bore its teeth into her. Then Laila shut off Mammy's voice. Instead, she savored the way Tariq had said us. How thrilling, how conspiratorial, it sounded coming from him. And how reassuring to hear him say it like that - casually, naturally. Us. It acknowledged their connection, crystallized it.

"And what are they saying?"

"That we're canoeing down the River of Sin," he said.

"Eating a slice of Impiety Cake."

"Riding the Rickshaw of Wickedness?" Laila chimed in.

"Making Sacrilege Qurma."

They both laughed. Then Tariq remarked that her hair was getting longer. "It's nice," he said.

Laila hoped she wasn't blushing. "You changed the subject."

"From what?"

"The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy."

"You know."

"Know what?"

"That I only ~ Khaled Hosseini

I think he loved us equally, but differently. ~ Khaled Hosseini

War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace. - Baba ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Takes a donkey to know a donkey. ~ Khaled Hosseini

A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver ~ Khaled Hosseini

Hassan and I were stunned. Dazed. John Wayne didn't really speak Farsi ~ Khaled Hosseini

He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Thats the thing about people who mean every thing they say. They think everybody else does too. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us. ~ Khaled Hosseini

He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. 'For you a thousand times over!' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

It was a long time ago , but people make mistakes when they think they can barry the past . It can simlpy flow to the surface . ~ Khaled Hosseini

A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. ~ Khaled Hosseini

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel. ~ Khaled Hosseini

But they were wasting their time. Because Hassan stood with his arms wide open, smiling, waiting for the kite. And may God - if He exists, that is - strike me blind if the kite didn't just drop into his outstretched arms. ~ Khaled Hosseini

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The Chinese say it's better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Dervish and a girl with limp blond hair were playing a lethargic ~ Khaled Hosseini

You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a littele ~ Khaled Hosseini

I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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

A sadness came over me. Returning to Kabul was like running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn't been good to him, that he'd become homeless and destitute. ~ Khaled Hosseini

She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer. ~ Khaled Hosseini

In a British accent, he tells me his name is Dr.Nawaz, and suddenly I want to be away from this man, because I don't think I can bear what he has come to tell me. He says the boy had cut himself deeply and had lost a great deal of blood and my mouth begins to mutter that prayer again:
La illaha ila Allah, Muhammad u rasul ullah.
They had to transfuse several units of red cells-
How will I tell Soraya?
Twice, they had to revive him-
I will do namaz, I will do zakat.
They would have lost him if his heart hadn't been young and strong-
I will fast.
He is alive. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Sad stories make good books ~ Khaled Hosseini

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended. Our way of life. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

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. ~ Khaled Hosseini

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names. ~ Khaled Hosseini