Khaled Hosseini: Thing

“You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.”

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

“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.”

“It's a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.”

“Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.”

“In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.”

“All good things in life are fragile and easily lost”

“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.”

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

“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”

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

“Blood is a powerful thing”

“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.”

“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.”

“For you, a thousand times over." Then I turned and ran. It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything alright. It didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. But I'll take it. With open arms.”

“Hassan returned the smile. Except his didn’t look forced. And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too”

“It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.”