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Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist and physician. After graduating from college, he worked as a doctor in California, a predicament that he likened to "an arranged marriage." He has published three novels, most notably his 2003 debut The Kite Runner, all of which are at least partially set in Afghanistan and feature an Afghan as the protagonist. Following the success of The Kite Runner he retired from medicine to write full-time.

Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. His father worked as a diplomat, and when Hosseini was 11 years old, the family moved to France; four years later, they applied for asylum in the United States, where he later became a citizen. Hosseini did not return to Afghanistan until 2001 at the age of 36, where he "felt like a tourist in [his] own country". In interviews about the experience, he admitted to sometimes feeling survivor's guilt for having been able to leave the country before the Soviet invasion and subsequent wars.

All three of his novels became bestsellers: The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, four of them at number one. A Thousand Splendid Suns was a Times Best Seller for 103 weeks, 15 at number one. And the Mountains Echoed debuted near the top of the Times list and remained on it for 33 weeks until January 2014. Wikipedia  

✵ 4. March 1965
Khaled Hosseini photo
Khaled Hosseini: 226 quotes34 likes

Khaled Hosseini Quotes

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

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“Sad stories make good books”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“The finger cut, to save the hand.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

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

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

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

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.”

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.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

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

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

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

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

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

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“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”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“Blood is a powerful thing”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

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

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini

Source: El caçador d'estels

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

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

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

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Variant: God has granted you a special talent. It's now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.
Source: The Kite Runner

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner (2003)

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Laila, p. 250
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

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

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

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

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini

Source: The Kite Runner: A Portrait of the Marc Forster Film

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

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Jalil's letter
Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

“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”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

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

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

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

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

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

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

“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.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner