Khaled Hosseini 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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.188, Penguin

Topics: 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.

Topics: Writing, School, College, Medical School, Narrative Voice

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.31, A&C Black

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Hurt, Invisible Monsters, Powerful Life Changing

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.

Topics: Identity, Fiction, World, Something Bigger Than Yourself

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Writing, Nuts, Medicine, Nuts And Bolts, Meds

Marriage can wait, education cannot.

Topics: Inspirational, Marriage, School, Educated And Uneducated, Afghan

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.

Topics: Running, Government, Law, Central Government, Kabul

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Book, Writing, Thinking, Playing Roles

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

Topics: Honesty, Mean, Thinking, Gullibility, Earnestness

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.

Topics: Writing, Character, Shoes

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

Topics: Chance, Uneducated, Educated And Uneducated, Afghan

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.

Topics: Writing, Stories, Way

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Children, School, Thinking

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.

source: - Interview with James Mustich, www.csmonitor.com. November 24, 2008.

Topics: Country, Hurt, Children

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.329, A&C Black

Topics: 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.

Topics: Unique, Europe, Generations, Great Change

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.222, Penguin

Topics: Men, Suffering, Doe

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

Topics: Roles, Rebuilding, Difficult, Afghan

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

Topics: Fiction, Alive, Periods

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

Topics: 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...

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.67, A&C Black

Topics: Life, May, Sometimes

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2011). “The Kite Runner: Rejacketed”, p.7, A&C Black

Topics: Eye, People, Soul, Window To The 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.

Topics: Men, Thinking, Voice

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

Topics: Children, Book, Color, Favorite Color

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.382, A&C Black

Topics: Thinking, Charm

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.24, A&C Black

Topics: 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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.340, A&C Black

Topics: Thinking, Funny Things, People

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

Topics: Book, People, Rooms

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2011). “The Kite Runner: Rejacketed”, p.185, A&C Black

Topics: 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.

Topics: Pain, Heart, Dark, Ferry

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.344, A&C Black

Topics: 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.

Topics: Husband, Son, Wife, I Am Alive

There is a way to be good again...

Topics: 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.

Topics: Children, Husband, Lying

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

Topics: Women, Compass, Accusing, Accusing Me

You can not stop you from being who you are.

Topics: Can Not, Who You Are

True redemption is...when guilt leads to good.

Topics: 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.

Topics: War, Robots, Mars, Afghan

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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.214, A&C Black

Topics: 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.

Topics: Life, Fall, Hands, Whirlpools

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Past, Way, Amir, Frigid, Overcast

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.

Topics: Summer, Block, Night, Summer Nights, Lungs

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.

Topics: Fear, Hate, Black And White

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.188, Penguin

Topics: 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.

Topics: Girl, Smart, War

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

Topics: Goodness

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Mother, Hurt, Book

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

Topics: Children, Fall, Terror

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

Topics: Punishment, Heartless, Undone

Sad stories make good books

Topics: Book, Stories, Good Book, Sad Story

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

Topics: Spring, Snow, Bird, Amir, Open Arms

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.

Topics: Dream, Simple, Sorrow, Skin And Bones

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.

source: - Source: www.denofgeek.com

Topics: Years, Two, Self

She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Pain, Night, Slipping, Packing Up, Fanfare

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.

Topics: Dark, Night, Men, Beloved Wife, Happy Man

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Boys, Sun, Radiance, Undisputed

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.

Topics: Roots, Important, Trying

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.402, A&C Black

Topics: Gratitude, Eye, Liquid, Catch Me

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

Topics: Life, Inspiring, Odds, Insurmountable 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.

Topics: Years, Doe, Sociopath, English Words

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.

Topics: Odds, Worry, Stupidity, Lunacy

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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2009). “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, p.96, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Thinking, Men, Needs, Accusing

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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.127, A&C Black

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Faith, Real, Book, Corridors, House Of God

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

source: - Twitter post from Nov 30, 2014

Topics: Simple, Waiting, Hardship

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

Topics: Tea, Chinese, Three, Chinese Food, Tea Party

For you, a thousand times over

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.110, A&C Black

Topics: Love, Thousand, Amir, Circularity, Slingshots

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

Topics: Lying, Writing, Fiction, Weaving

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

Topics: Silence, Pushing, Buttons, Amir, Quiet Life

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.98, Penguin

Topics: Say Anything

A stubborn ***** needs a stubborn driver

Topics: Needs, Stubborn, Ass

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.

Topics: Eye, Garden, Grieving, Rose Garden, Typhoons

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.

Topics: Heart, Thinking, Years

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

Topics: Mother, Heartbreaking, Sound, I Pray, Amir

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Children, Play, Parent, Parent Child Relationship

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: Flower, Heart, Two

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

Topics: Regret, Ocean

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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Beautiful, Guilt, Battle

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

Topics: 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.

Topics: 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.

Topics: Apology, Trying, Path

In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

Topics: Running, Art, Memories, Perishing, Art Lovers

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.

Topics: Drinking, Cutting, Hands

I finally had what I'd wantes all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.

Topics: Years, Legs, Pool

Now, especially in public places, you always have that unease. When the children were cast, if I thought that they might be victims of violence because of participating in this movie, we would have chosen children from outside this country.

Topics: Life, Country, Children

At the door , she made him promise to go without goodbyes .She closed the door on him . Laila leaned her back against it , shaking against his pounding fists , one arm gripping her belly and a hand across her mouth , as he spoke throughout the door and promised that he would come back for her . She stood there until he tired , until he gave up , and then she listened to his uneven footsteps until they faded , until all was quiet , save for the gunfire cracking in the hills and her own heart thudding in her belly , her eyes , her bones .

Topics: Goodbye, Eye, Tired

At times , he didn't understand the meaning of the Koran's words . But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue . He said they comforted him , eased his heart . "They'll comfort you too . Mrariam jo , " he said . "You can summon then in your time of your need , and they won't fail you . God's words will never betray you , my girl . (pg.17)

Topics: Girl, Heart, Needs

Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.

Topics: Textbooks, Littles, Firsts, Hassan

Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.

Topics: Long, Coward, Helping

In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.

Topics: Years, Age, World

these random unkind moment that catch you wen you least expect them.

Topics: Moments, Unkind

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

Topics: Gone, Said

The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word 'senseless' springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

Topics: Depressing, Spring, People, Acts Of Violence

People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don't they? Like a badge? I'm being genuine.

Topics: People, Dignity, Genuine, Countryside

I may not agree with all or even most of the tribal traditions, but it seems ti me that, out there, people live more authentic lives. They have a sturdiness about them. A refreshing humility. Hospitality too. And resilience. A sense of pride.

Topics: Humility, Pride, People, Authentic Life

I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.

Topics: Night, Wind, Tree

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

Topics: Color, Long, Shade

They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.

Topics: Heart, Water, Wade

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.

Topics: Pain, Minutes, Spokes

you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.

Topics: Honor, Burden, Shoulders

Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.

Topics: Squares, Tragedy, Kabul

Dr. Bashiri, if I ever want to put a curse in someone, I say, 'May God give you a restaurant.

Topics: Giving, Drs, May

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

Topics: Lying, Silence, Wake Up, Hoping Someone

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

Topics: Air, Breathing, Bricks

If I ever do get married," Tariq said, "they'll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head

Topics: Gun, Guy, Rooms

I think he loved us equally, but differently.

Topics: Thinking

The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.

Topics: Cities, People, Waiting, Waiting For Something

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

Topics: People

hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.

Topics: Fall, Blue, Sky, Sun Setting, Hazy

I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.

Topics: People, Way, Unhappiness, Recourse

For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.

Topics: Nothing To Lose, Stakes

The finger cut, to save the hand.

Topics: Cutting, Hands, Fingers

cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.

Topics: Shade, Cruelty, Benevolence

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

Topics: Ignorance, Annoyed, Arbitrary, Blithe, Privileged Life

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

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

Topics: Mistake, Flower, Past

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

Topics: Book, Reading, Men

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.

Topics: Pain, Cutting, Blow

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.

Topics: School, Kids, Son, Afghan

It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.

Topics: Waste, Talent, Donkey, God Given Talents

All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

Topics: Night, Men, Tenderness

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.

Topics: Good Luck, Kids, Independent, Hindi, Hassan

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born...

Topics: Morning, Children, Bombs, Gunshots

Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. "For you," he said. "I'd kill with it for you, Laila.

Topics: Gun, Lovely, Denim

Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought into making you.

Topics: Men, Simple, Hands, Plumbing, Mahogany

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.

Topics: Mother, Art, Father, Obstinacy

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.

Topics: Writing, Night, Giving, Aspiring Writers

The Taliban's acts of cultural vandalism - the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas - had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books, and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters, and sculptors.

Topics: Book, Vcr, Tape, Vandalism, Taliban

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Romance

If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.

Topics: Drinking, Scotch, Important

I remember reading 'The Grapes of Wrath' in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in English where I had an 'Aha!' moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter.

Topics: Book, Reading, School, Learning English, Aha Moment

I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.

Topics: Way, Stories, Elements, Element Of Surprise

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.

Topics: Beach, Brother, Heart

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

Topics: Cancer, Names, Satan

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.

Topics: Needs, Stories

A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.

Topics: Mother, Heart, Men, Like A Mother

Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.

Topics: Moments, Unkind

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

Topics: People, Brotherhood, Amir, Kinship

and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.

Topics: Mother, Leaving, World

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

Topics: World, End Of The World, Ends, Woman Leader, Inspirational Women

You changed the subject." "From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?" "That I only have eyes for you.

Topics: Girl, Sexy, Eye, You Changed

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

Topics: Time, Details, Stealing

I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.

Topics: Sorry, Grief, Loss, Death And Loss, Afghan

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

Topics: Sunflower, Attention, Sun

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

Topics: Song, Husband, Silence

Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).

Topics: Moving Forward, Catharsis, Goes On, Caravans

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.

Topics: Father, Flames, Knives, Hassan, Kabul

A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.

Topics: Boys, Men, Amir

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

Topics: Writing, Work Out, Worry

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.

Topics: Memories, Past, Color

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.

Topics: Powerful, Rocks, Scary

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

Topics: Writing, Literature, Tradition, Novel Writing

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

Topics: Winning, World, Way

Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.

Topics: Love, Children, Sleep, Screen Doors, Newborn Child

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2008). “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, p.347, A&C Black

Topics: Wall, Moon, Sun, Shimmer, Thousand Splendid Suns

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.

Topics: Regret, Thinking, Should Have, Never Regret

Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.

source: - "Khaled Hosseini: The Threads That Connect Us" by Khaled Hosseini, www.shelf-awareness.com.

Topics: Long, Vacuums, Our Actions, Consequences Of Our Actions

You've always been a tourist here. You just didn't know it.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.176, Penguin

Topics: Tourists, Knows

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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.37, A&C Black

Topics: Mouths, Might, Said

When I was in Afghanistan in 2007, I went from village to village where refugees had returned, and they were living out in the open under tents, sometimes completely exposed to the environment. And they were homeless, which meant they would lose children in the winter to the cold and in the summers in the extreme heat. It's extremely humiliating for them to be homeless, culturally it's very shameful.

source: - "Web Exclusive Interview: Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini to Speak on Refugee Crisis at Event in Lafayette". Interview with Pete Crooks, www.diablomag.com. April 2009.

Topics: Summer, Children, Winter

Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.

source: - "Web Exclusive Interview: Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini to Speak on Refugee Crisis at Event in Lafayette". Interview with Peter Crooks, www.diablomag.com. April 2009.

Topics: People, Choices, Way, Moral Choices

When I went to Afghanistan in 2003, I walked into a war zone. Entire neighborhoods had been demolished. There were an overwhelming number of widows and orphans and people who had been physically and emotionally damaged; every 10-year-old kid on the street knew how to dismantle a Kalashnikov in under a minute. I would flip through math textbooks intended for third grade, fourth grade, and they would include word problems such as, "If you have 100 grenades and 20 mujahideen, how many grenades per mujahideen do you get?" War has infiltrated every facet of life.

source: - "Khaled Hosseini, Kabul’s Splendid Son". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. May/June 2009.

Topics: War, Kids, Math, Mujahideen, Grenade

It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.367, A&C Black

Topics: Choices, Kind, Rigor, Cornered

And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

Topics: Father, Real, Believe, Amir, Friend In Need

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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.162, A&C Black

Topics: Moving, Catharsis, Doe, Hindi, Caravans

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but 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. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.14, Penguin

Topics: Wall, Winter, Past, Overcast, Peeking

But then it passed, as all things do.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.15, A&C Black

Topics: All Things

My family left Afghanistan in 1976, well before the Communist coup and the Soviet invasion. We certainly thought we would be going back. But when we saw those Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan, the prospect for return looked very dim. Few of us, I have to say, envisioned that nearly a quarter century of bloodletting would follow.

source: - Interview with Razeshta Sethna, newslinemagazine.com. November, 2003.

Topics: Tanks, Rolling, Would Be, Bloodletting

It's tremendous what can happen when suddenly you make an emotional connection.

source: - "Web Exclusive Interview: Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini to Speak on Refugee Crisis at Event in Lafayette". Interview with Peter Crooks, www.diablomag.com. April 25, 2009.

Topics: Emotional, Connections, Emotional Connection

All good things in life are fragile and easily lost

Topics: Things In Life, Good Things, Lost, Good Things In Life

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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.125, A&C Black

Topics: Long, Grace, Coward, Saving Grace

some stories don't need telling

Topics: Needs, Stories

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

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.59, Penguin

Topics: Winning, Matter

In early 1999, I was watching TV, when I came across a story on Afghanistan. It was a story about the Taliban and the restrictions they were imposing on the Afghan people, most notably women. At some point in the story, there was a casual reference to them having banned the game of kite fighting. This detail struck a personal chord with me, as I had grown up in Kabul flying kite with my friends.

source: - "GeekDad Interview: Khaled Hosseini, Author of The Kite Runner". Interview with Tony Sims, www.wired.com. September 30, 2011.

Topics: Fighting, Games, People, Kabul

Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock. And

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.296, A&C Black

Topics: Needs, Injustice, Flocks, Downtrodden, Wardens

And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

Topics: Country, Wall, Looks, Walls Up, Mongols

He knew I'd seen everything in that alley, that I'd stood there and done nothing. He knew that I'd betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.86, Penguin

Topics: Done, Betrayed, Lasts

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.292, A&C Black

Topics: Real, Home, Self, Life Unfolding, Hollow

‎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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.242, A&C Black

Topics: Girl, War, Smart, Young Women, Afghan

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.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.87, A&C Black

Topics: Night, Feelings, Bed

It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.145, A&C Black

Topics: Hurt, People, Sometimes, Bad People

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

Topics: Love, Moving, People

I'm gladly doing my own thing for the time being.

source: - "Web Exclusive Interview: Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini to Speak on Refugee Crisis at Event in Lafayette". Interview with Peter Crooks, www.diablomag.com. April 2009.

Topics: My Own

Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975 —and all that followed— was already laid in those first words.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2010). “The Complete Khaled Hosseini: Digital box set”, p.10, A&C Black

Topics: Winter, Thinking, Names, Amir, Hassan

At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.

source: - Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.71, A&C Black

Topics: Choices, Doe, Horizon