Khaled Hosseini: Trending quotes

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

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“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: And the Mountains Echoed

“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.”

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

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

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Kabul is… a thousand tragedies per square mile.”

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“Life is a train, get on board.”

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“Sad stories make good books”

Source: The Kite Runner

“Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.”

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Source: The Kite Runner

“The finger cut, to save the hand.”

Source: The Kite Runner

“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.”

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion”

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Variant: Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion".
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“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.”

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“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.”

Source: The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini

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

“Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. 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 women suffer.”

Cab Driver, p. 146
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

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

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns