Khaled Hosseini Quotes (83 Quotes)

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.

I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.

That night, I waited until Baba fell asleep, and then folded a blanket. I used it as a prayer rug. Bowing my head to the ground, I recited half-forgotten verses from the Koran-verses the mullah had made us commit to memory in Kabul-and asked for kindness from a god I wasn't sure existed. I envied the mullah now, envied his faith and certainty.

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

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.

That's how children deal with terror, they fall asleep.

But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her

She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and sometimes not.

Children aren't your colouring books. You Don't get to fill them with your favourite colours

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.

The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.

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.

She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

For you, a thousand times over

If the story had been about anyone else, it would been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate ---sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school.

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.

Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn't bypass you, Laila.

She would grab whatever she could -a look , a whisper , a moan - to salvage from perishing , to perserve. But time is most unforgivving of fires , and she couldn't , in the end , save it all .

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.

If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thous didst it of thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting.

There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

Happiness like this is frightening....they only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something away from you

In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.

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

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.

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.

Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980's: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.

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

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.