Khaled Hosseini famous quotes

She said, 'I'm so afraid.' And I said, 'why?,' and she said, 'Because I'm so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.' I asked her why and she said, 'They only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Life #Drs #Said

I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing. So what I know about writing, I know from my own instincts, and whatever the narrative voice is in my own head.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Writing #School #College

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

#Inspirational #Life #Hurt

You are never alone in Afghanistan. You are always in the company of others, usually family. You don't understand yourself really as an individual, you understand yourself as part of something bigger than yourself. Family is so central to your identity, to how you make sense of your world, it is very dramatic, and therefore an amazing source of storytelling, a source of fiction for me.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Identity #Fiction #World

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

#Sad #Sorrow #Trials

I don't know the nuts and bolts of writing. I studied medicine. I was a pre-med nerd. So everything I learned, I know about writing is very instinctive.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Writing #Nuts #Medicine

Marriage can wait, education cannot.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Inspirational #Marriage #School

Afghanistan has always been sort of a fractured nation, very tribal, where the countryside and the distant provinces have been run by custom, by tribal law and by tribal leaders rather than edicts from the central government in Kabul.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Running #Government #Law

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

#Life #Lying #Sin

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

#Book #Writing #Thinking

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Honesty #Mean #Thinking

The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Writing #Character #Shoes

A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated...
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Chance #Uneducated

I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Writing #Stories #Way

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

#War #Demand #Baba

Throughout the last century there were multiple attempts at giving Afghan women more autonomy, to change marriage laws, to abolish the practice of bride price and child marriage, and to enforce women to be involved in school. Every time, the reaction from the traditionalists was one of contempt and scorn and at times outright rebellion. I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Children #School #Thinking

J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Regret #Thinking #Wish

No matter where we're born, which countries we're raised in, what cultures we come from, there are some universal experiences we all have as children. We all kind of start the same. We want the love of our parents, companionship, friends, we want to have fun, to play, and we're all hurt the first time we learn that the world is far from perfect place - it's the start of a series of epiphanies and realizations that is what growing up is all about.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Country #Hurt #Children

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Given #Enormous

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.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Unique #Europe #Generations

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Men #Suffering #Doe

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

#Roles #Rebuilding #Difficult

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

#Fiction #Alive #Periods

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

#Home #Writing #Editors

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime...
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Life #May #Sometimes

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Eye #People #Soul

President Karzai is an incredibly kind and decent man. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he genuinely cares for his people. But I think he had too much of a tendency to want to rule by listening to all voices at all times.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Men #Thinking #Voice

Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Children #Book #Color

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Thinking #Charm

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Love You #Suffering #Poor

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

#Thinking #Funny Things #People

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Book #People #Rooms

it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Hurt #Firsts

What was I supposed to be, growing in your womb -- assuming it was even in our womb that I was conceived? A seed of hope? A ticket purchased to ferry you from the dark? A patch for that hole you carried in your heart? If so, then I wasn't enough. I wasn't nearly enough. I was no balm to your pain, only another dead end, another burden, and you must have seen that early on. You must have realized it. But what could you do? You couldn't go down to the pawnshop and sell me.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Pain #Heart #Dark

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

#Regret #Lost

and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Husband #Son #Wife

There is a way to be good again...
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Way #Be Good

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.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Children #Husband #Lying

Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Women #Compass #Accusing

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Mouths #Might #Said

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

#Can Not #Who You Are

True redemption is...when guilt leads to good.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Guilt #Redemption

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.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#War #Robots #Mars

I've read that if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Lying #Snow #Demise

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

#Life #Fall #Hands

She passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and it accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Life #Dream #Mistake

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

#Variation #Matter #Sin

It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Past #Way

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.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Summer #Block #Night

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Fear #Hate #Black And White

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

#Weed #Spring #Flower

‎I know you're still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Girl #Smart #War

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

#Goodness

A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Moving #Matter #Stories

One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Mother #Hurt #Book

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

#Children #Fall #Terror

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

#Punishment #Heartless #Undone

Sad stories make good books
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Book #Stories #Good Book

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Spring #Snow #Bird

I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Dream #Simple #Sorrow

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

#Years #Two #Self

She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Knees

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Home #Keys #Doors

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

#Pain #Night #Slipping

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Dark #Night #Men

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

#Humility #Heart #Long

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

#Boys #Sun #Radiance

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Roots #Important #Trying

A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Gratitude #Eye #Liquid

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Life #Inspiring #Odds

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Years #Doe #Sociopath

She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Odds #Worry #Stupidity

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

#Book #Teach #Wells

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

#Weed #Envy #Water

In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Thinking #Men #Needs

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.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Mind #Purpose #Sometimes

Life just doesn't care about our aspirations, or sadness. It's often random, and it's often stupid and it's often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Stupid #Sadness #Care

there is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him... there is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He will forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need. I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Faith #Real #Book

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

#Simple #Waiting #Hardship

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

#Tea #Chinese #Three

For you, a thousand times over
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Love #Thousand

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Lying #Writing #Fiction

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Silence #Pushing #Buttons

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Say Anything

A stubborn ***** needs a stubborn driver
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Needs #Stubborn #Ass

People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Children #People #Given

Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Eye #Garden #Grieving

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

#Heart #Thinking #Years

it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Mother #Heartbreaking #Sound

I don't know whom or what he was defying. [...] [M]aybe the God he had never believed in.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Defying

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

#Children #Play #Parent

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

#America #Optimism #Made

She wished she could visit Mariam's grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn't matter. Mariam is never very far.... Mariam is in her own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Flower #Heart #Two

Regret... when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Regret #Ocean

Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Moved On #Ends #Moved

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#People #Conservative #Medieval

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.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Beautiful #Guilt #Battle

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

#Girl #Games #Names

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

#Ocean #Feelings #Inability

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.
-- Khaled Hosseini

#Apology #Trying #Path