Khaled Hosseini citations

Page 4

“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.”

“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.”

“No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.”

“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.”

“Look at me, Mariam.'
Reluctantly, Mariam did.
Nana said, 'Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”