Khaled Hosseini Quotes
In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.
That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does.
He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn't. It spilled out of her, came pouring out her eyes.
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.
I wondered when I had forgotten that, despite everything, he was still just a child.
A society has no chance of success if it's women are uneducated.
I would have told them that he lived a life lacking in purpose or direction. Like those aimless rides I took him on. A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by. An indifferent life.
You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel.
Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. 'It wasn't meant to be', Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.
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 bare to lose.
She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How she could ever cope with his permanent absence?
You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But they are things that, well, you just have to see and feel. p.147
Nothing came out. Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above.
And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.
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.
What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits.
I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.
she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back.She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother.
... there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.
Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is.
It would be an existence rife with difficulties... but of a pleasurable kind, difficulties they could take pride in, possess, value, as one would a family heirloom.
I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.
Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one.
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.
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.
To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things.
Her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head.
Exploitation to finance a beach house in Hawaii was one thing. Doing it to feed your kids was another.
Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist.
He knew I betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.
The reputation of a girl ... is a delicate thing. Like a mynah bird in your hands. slacken your grip and away it flies.
When you kill a man, You steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, Rob his children of a father.
Kabul fell prey to men who looked like they had tumbled out of their mothers with Kalashnikov in hand...
They rarely look at Baba -- the teenagers -- and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him.
I was good at being a doctor my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.
