Khaled Hosseini citations

Page 3

“c'est une erreur d'affirmer qu'on peut enterrer le passé, il s'accroche tant et si bien qu'il remonte toujours à la surface.”

“La beauté est un don du ciel énorme, immérité, accordé de manière aléatoire et stupide.”

“J'ai appris que le monde ne voit pas ce qu'il y a en vous, qu'il se moque complètement des espoirs, des rêves, des chagrins qui reposent cachés sous votre peau et vos os. C'est aussi simple que ça. Mes patients le savent, eux. Il constataient qu'une grande partie de ce qu'ils étaient, de ce qu'ils seraient ou de ce qu'ils pourraient être dépendait de la symétrie de leur ossature, de l'espace entre leurs yeux, de la longueur de leur menton, de leur nez, du fait qu'ils aient ou non un angle naso-frontal idéal ou pas.”

“Mais la bataille qui se livrait en lui se lisait sur son visage. Et sa peur aussi. Pas seulement celle qu'il éprouvait pour moi et ce qui risquait de m'arriver à 4500 kilomètres de chez nous. Mais aussi la peur qu'il avait de moi. Sa peur de me perdre. Sa peur devant mon absence, de réduire en pièces son coeur mis à nu et vulnérable si je le décidais, comme un doberman déchiquetant un chaton.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Life is a train, get on board.”

“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.”

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

“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.”