Top 100 Khaled Hosseini Quotes
#1. Do you even know how strong God has made you? she said. How strong and good He has made you?
Khaled Hosseini
#3. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980s: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules.
Khaled Hosseini
#4. For a few unfortunate kids, winter did not spell the end of the school year. There were the so-called voluntary winter courses. No kid I knew ever volunteered to go to these classes; parents, of course, did the volunteering for them.
Khaled Hosseini
#5. In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.
Khaled Hosseini
#6. You're afraid, Nana, she might have said. You're afraid that I might find the happiness you never had. And you don't want me to be happy. You don't want a good life for me. You're the one with the wretched heart.
Khaled Hosseini
#7. I'm all you have in this world Mariam, and when I'm gone you'll have nothing. You ARE nothing!
Khaled Hosseini
#9. I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.
Khaled Hosseini
#10. I wondered when I had forgotten that, despite everything, he was still just a child.
Khaled Hosseini
#11. Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.
Khaled Hosseini
#13. We'd each roll to our side of the bed and let our own savior take us away. Soraya's was sleep. Mine, as always, was a book.
Khaled Hosseini
#14. Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world.
Khaled Hosseini
#15. EB: Perhaps it's her way of rebelling. You know a thing or two about rebellion, I think.
NW: Yes, but I did it the proper way. I drank and smoked and took lovers. Who rebels with mathematics?
Khaled Hosseini
#16. People learned to live with the
most unimaginable things.
Khaled Hosseini
#17. 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
#20. I may not agree with all or even most of the tribal traditions, but it seems ti me that, out there, people live more authentic lives. They have a sturdiness about them. A refreshing humility. Hospitality too. And resilience. A sense of pride.
Khaled Hosseini
#21. After all, didn't all fathers in their secret hearts harbor a desire to kill their sons?
Khaled Hosseini
#22. Other Afghans from American, or from Europe," Amra says, "they come and take picture of her. They take video. They make promises. Then they go home and show their families. LIke she is zoo animal. I allow it because I think maybe they will help. But they forget. I never hear from them.
Khaled Hosseini
#23. I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on.
Khaled Hosseini
#25. A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
Khaled Hosseini
#26. 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.
Khaled Hosseini
#27. Adel could almost feel himself leapfrogging over childhood. Soon, he would land as an adult. And when he did, there would be no going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: once you became one, you died one. Lying
Khaled Hosseini
#28. I know. I know. But he's always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he's lost in some dream." "And?" "I wasn't like that." Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Khan laughed. "Children aren't colouring books. You don't get to fill them with your favourite colours.
Khaled Hosseini
#29. Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not,
Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not.
If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive,
Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not.
Khaled Hosseini
#30. Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is.
Khaled Hosseini
#31. She said, 'I'm so afraid.' And I said, 'why?,' and she said, 'Because I'm so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.' I asked her why and she said, 'They only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.
Khaled Hosseini
#32. But they were wasting their time. Because Hassan stood with his arms wide open, smiling, waiting for the kite. And may God - if He exists, that is - strike me blind if the kite didn't just drop into his outstretched arms.
Khaled Hosseini
#33. I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills.
Khaled Hosseini
#34. Thought, She's your wife. My mother, we buried. But he knew to stifle those words before they came
Khaled Hosseini
#35. President Karzai is an incredibly kind and decent man. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he genuinely cares for his people. But I think he had too much of a tendency to want to rule by listening to all voices at all times.
Khaled Hosseini
#36. Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist.
Khaled Hosseini
#37. To this day, I find it hard to gaze directly at people like Hassan, people who mean every word they say.
Khaled Hosseini
#38. And if he knew, then what would I see if I did look in his eyes? Blame? Indignation? Or, God forbid, what I feared most: guileless devotion? That, most of all, I couldn't bear to see.
Khaled Hosseini
#39. 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
#40. But the fact is, I looked at my life and realized I already had what people sought in marriage.
Khaled Hosseini
#41. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person.
Khaled Hosseini
#42. I read actual physical books and have thus far avoided the electronic lure.
Khaled Hosseini
#43. Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!
Khaled Hosseini
#45. In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.
Khaled Hosseini
#46. Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.
Khaled Hosseini
#48. 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
#49. Usually in films, when Muslims pray, it's either before or after they've blown something up.
Khaled Hosseini
#50. Mariam always held her breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that she didn't breathe God would grant her another day with Jalil.
Khaled Hosseini
#51. Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand ... well, God put a lot of thought into making you.
Khaled Hosseini
#53. And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.
Khaled Hosseini
#54. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace. - Baba
Khaled Hosseini
#55. You know the old bit," he said. "You're on a deserted island. You can have five books. Which do you choose? I never thought I'd actually have to.
Khaled Hosseini
#56. A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand ... well, God put a lot of thought in making you.
Khaled Hosseini
#57. The moment is brief, barely enough for a flutter of the pulse but long enough for her illusory self to catch up with the reality of the woman gazing back from the shopwindow. It is a little devastating. This is what aging is, she thinks
Khaled Hosseini
#58. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence.
Khaled Hosseini
#59. Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
Khaled Hosseini
#60. In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.
Khaled Hosseini
#61. What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits.
Khaled Hosseini
#62. But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
Khaled Hosseini
#63. She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami was an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.
Khaled Hosseini
#64. I lay on the side of the dirt road next to a rocky trench, looked up to the gray morning sky, thankful for air, thankful for light, thankful to be alive.
Khaled Hosseini
#65. He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more, to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty. He sighed happily, and listened to the wind sweeping down from the mountains, to the chirping of night birds.
Khaled Hosseini
#68. It's a very nice kind of quasi-fame being a writer, because you remain largely anonymous and you can have a private life, which I really cherish. I don't like to be in the public light all that much. I don't crave the whole fame thing at all.
Khaled Hosseini
#69. It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.
Khaled Hosseini
#71. -a face as suggestive of early maturity as his brother's was of lingering boyishness.
Khaled Hosseini
#73. I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.
Khaled Hosseini
#74. Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.
Khaled Hosseini
#76. He was also one of those boys so bursting with energy that he drained others of theirs.
Khaled Hosseini
#77. I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.
Khaled Hosseini
#78. Big hazel eyes ... she had this laugh ... I can still hear it sometimes.
Khaled Hosseini
#79. What was it about a season's first snowfall, Mariam wondered, that was so entrancing? Was it the chance to see something as yet unsoiled, untrodden? To catch the fleeting grace of a new season, a lovely beginning, before it was trampled and corrupted?
Khaled Hosseini
#80. You say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.
Khaled Hosseini
#81. 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
#82. A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.
Khaled Hosseini
#83. Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.
Khaled Hosseini
#85. My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write.
Khaled Hosseini
#86. 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
#87. When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.
Khaled Hosseini
#88. In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.
Khaled Hosseini
#89. A sadness came over me. Returning to Kabul was like running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn't been good to him, that he'd become homeless and destitute.
Khaled Hosseini
#90. I don't know the nuts and bolts of writing. I studied medicine. I was a pre-med nerd. So everything I learned, I know about writing is very instinctive.
Khaled Hosseini
#91. He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.
Khaled Hosseini
#92. 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
#94. After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.
Khaled Hosseini
#96. I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.
Khaled Hosseini
#97. I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I'd always feared they would.
Khaled Hosseini
#98. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and I am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost,grasping for breath.
Khaled Hosseini
#99. 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
#100. She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than i did the sun for shining on me.
Khaled Hosseini
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