Khaled Hosseini Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.

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.

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

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

There is a way to be good again.

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

But then it passed, as all things do.

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.

[Flying kite with my friends] is one of the seminal memories of growing up for me.

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

I guess some stories do not need telling.

By then The Kite Runner had become quite successful and I found myself in a position that I had always dreamed of my whole life, which was to write for a living.

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

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

Sad stories make good books

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

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

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.

The story of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, however, is a very important one, and fertile ground for fiction.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I also felt The Kite Runner was a story that would lend itself well to a visual retelling in a graphic novel.

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

I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.

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

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

All good things in life are fragile and easily lost

cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.

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.

she held her breath, and in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day

Life is a train, get on board.