Khaled Hosseini Quotes

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“Sad stories make good books”

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

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

“The finger cut, to save the hand.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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'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.”

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

“Blood is a powerful thing”

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

“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.”

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

“i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.”

“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.”

“Gone.
Vanished.
Nothing left.
Nothing said.”

“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.”

“Laila: Tell your secrets to the wind but don't blame it for telling the trees.”

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

“She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.”

“I think that everything he did, feeding the poor, giving money to friends in need, it was all a way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.”

“America was different. America was a river, roarng along, unmindful of the past. 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.”

“I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.”

“A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied butby the turbulence that washes over her.”

“He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ''For you a thousand times over!'' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.”

“The Chinese say it is better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.”

“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.”

“You can not stop you from being who you are.”

“People learned to live with the
most unimaginable things.”

“But then it passed, as all things do.”

“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.”

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

“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”

“I think he loved us equally, but differently.”

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

“People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.”

“You’re not going to cry, are you?
- I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.”

“And one more thing… You will never again refer to him as 'Hazara boy' in my presence. He has a name and it's Sohrab.”

“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.”