Even after The Kite Runner was published I continued to practice for another eighteen months. But I had always had a love of writing and a compulsion to do it.

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I am going to give my psychoanalyst one more year then I'm going to Lourdes.

Serving reconnects people to purpose. Serving someone else's dream empowers not just us, but them.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

You cannot accurately remember color.

So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.

I don't do damsel in distress very well. It's hard for me to play a victim.

It seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.

Sometimes I would bring some of my music to the school and perform on the playground, and they'd think, "There goes Patrick, trying to entertain everyone as usual."

I don't see myself as a stand-up comic doing cynical, mean-spirited or disrespectful stuff. I'm very aware that I don't like to disrespect people too much.

I might have faults but I'm not a big head.