Khaled Hosseini Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Khaled Hosseini.
Famous Quotes By Khaled Hosseini
The world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. — Khaled Hosseini
Mammy had a point.
What rankled Laila was that Mammy hadn't earned the right to make it. It would have been one thing if Babi had raised this issue. But Mammy? All those years of aloofness, of cooping herself up and not caring where Laila went and whom she saw and what she thought ... It was unfair. Laila felt like she was no better than these pots and pans, something that could go neglected, then laid claim to, at will, whenever the mood struck. — Khaled Hosseini
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
It was a long time ago , but people make mistakes when they think they can barry the past . It can simlpy flow to the surface . — Khaled Hosseini
There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it. — Khaled Hosseini
There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir — Khaled Hosseini
Economic chasm between people is something that is of interest to me. And something that I used to write about even as a child. It's something I've revisited a few times in my writings. — Khaled Hosseini
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
I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night. — Khaled Hosseini
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
She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How shr could ever cope with his permanent absence? — Khaled Hosseini
I missed you."
There was a pause. Then Tariq turned to her with a half-grinning, half-grimacing look of distaste. "What's the matter with you?"
How many times had she, Hasina, and Giti said those same three words to each other, Laila wondered, said it without hesitation, after only two or three days of not seeing each other? I missed you, Hasina. Oh, I missed you too. In Tariq's grimace, Laila learned that boys differed from girls in this regard. They didn't make a show of friendship. They felt no urge, no need, for this sort of talk. Laila imagined it had been this way for her brothers too. Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
"I was trying to annoy you," she said.
He gave her a sidelong glance. "It worked."
But she thought his grimace softened. And she thought that maybe the sunburn on his cheeks deepened momentarily. — Khaled Hosseini
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
And that, ... is the story of our country, one invasion after another ... Macedonians. Saddanians. 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
I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn't. — Khaled Hosseini
Do you even know how strong God has made you? she said. How strong and good He has made you? — Khaled Hosseini
Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that's all she can do. That and hope. — Khaled Hosseini
Out beyond ideas — Khaled Hosseini
There's no monster...just a beautiful day. — Khaled Hosseini
Glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. — Khaled Hosseini
She is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart. — Khaled Hosseini
Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you're breaithing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. Cut you have to breathe to scream. Panic. — Khaled Hosseini
The Taliban's acts of cultural vandalism - the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas - had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books, and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters, and sculptors. — Khaled Hosseini
The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little. — Khaled Hosseini
For you, a thousand times over - The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini
Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food. — Khaled Hosseini
When you kill a man, you steal a life," Baba said. "You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see? — Khaled Hosseini
For the first time since we had crossed the border, I felt like I was back. After all these years, I was home again, standing on the soil of my ancestors. I sat against one of the house's clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land ... it surprised me. I'd been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I handn't. And, under the bony glow of a half-moon, I sensed [the land] humming under my feet. Maybe [it] hand't forgotten me either. — Khaled Hosseini
Must have been quite the culture shock, going there."
"Yes it was." Idris doesn't say that the real culture shock has been in coming back. — Khaled Hosseini
You changed the subject."
"From what?"
"The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy."
"You know."
"Know what?"
"That I only have eyes for you. — Khaled Hosseini
Hadn't we both yearned for escape, reinvention, new identities? Hadn't we each, in the end, unmoored ourselves by cutting loose the anchors that weighed us down? — Khaled Hosseini
It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn't and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is that it will snowball. the best way to put it is that I have no particular method or technique per se, other than this: I plan nothing, I outline nothing, I start with an idea or an image or a line of dialogue and see where it leads me. Because I never know what the next page will contain, let alone the end of the book, I am perpetually surprised by the course that my characters take. The writing process is as full of surprises and twists for me as the reading experience is for my readers. I love the spontaneity of writing this way, the possibilities left open, the feeling that I am not constrained or committed to any given path. Every day, I am surprised by something. It may not be the most efficient way of writing, but it has served me well thus far. — Khaled Hosseini
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
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
Clipped account of a mannered life, a life rich with achievement, grace, respect. — Khaled Hosseini
A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you. — Khaled Hosseini
For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture. — Khaled Hosseini
He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn't. It spilled out of her, came pouring out her eyes. — Khaled Hosseini
They would make new lives for themselves - peaceful, solitary lives - and there the weight of all that they'd endured would lift from them, and they would be deserving of all the happiness and simple prosperity they would find. — Khaled Hosseini
But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand. — Khaled Hosseini
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
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir — Khaled Hosseini
Masooma." "Could you?" "I could try," Parwana says. "Good. Then marry Saboor. Look after his — Khaled Hosseini
I've crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they're all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a little bit of charm
Or a lot
and that can fool you. But really they're all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven't been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it's a mistake to give it to them. They can't accept it. They can't accept the very thing they're needing. They end up hating you for it. And it never ends because they can't hate you enough. It never ends
the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all. My first husband was like that. — Khaled Hosseini
I noticed Wahid's boys, all three thin with dirt-caked faces and short-cropped brown hair under their skull caps, stealing furative glances at my digital wristwatch.
...I unsnapped the wristwatch and gave it to the youngest of the three boys. He muttered a sheepish "Tashakor."
"It tells you the time in any city in the world," I told him. The boys, nodding politely passing the watch between them, taking turns trying it on. But they lost interest and, soon the watch sat abandoned on the straw mat.
...I understood now why the boys hadn't shown any interest in the watch. They hadn't been staring at the watch at all. They'd been staring at my food. — Khaled Hosseini
Everywhere she looked, she saw bright colors: on the drab, gray concrete apartments, on the tin-roofed, open-fronted stores, in the muddy water flowing in the gutters. It was as though a rainbow had melted into her eyes. Rasheed — Khaled Hosseini
For you, a thousand times over — Khaled Hosseini
I watch because of that look of acceptance in the animal's eyes. Absurdly, I imagine the animal understands. I imagined the animal sees that its imminent demise is for a higher purpose. — Khaled Hosseini
A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver — Khaled Hosseini
But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. — Khaled Hosseini
One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples. — Khaled Hosseini
soon after we arrived in the U.S., Baba started grumbling about American flies. He'd sit at the kitchen table with his flyswatter, watch the flies darting from wall to wall, buzzing here, buzzing there, harried and rushed. "In this country, even flies are pressed for time," he'd groan. — Khaled Hosseini
In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them. — Khaled Hosseini
I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I'd always feared they would. — Khaled Hosseini
It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place. — Khaled Hosseini
Sometimes the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but that all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor. — Khaled Hosseini
Regret ... when it comes to you, I have oceans of it. — Khaled Hosseini
We saw our first Western together, Rio Bravo with John Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore. — Khaled Hosseini
I remembered how, as a boy, I would stew over all the things Mama wouldn't do, things other mothers did. Hold my hand when we walked. Sit me up on her lap, read bedtime stories, kiss my face good night. Those things were true enough. But, all those years, I'd been blind to a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me. — Khaled Hosseini
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
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
Don't be afraid to tell the truth. It's better to hurt someone by truth than to make them happy by lies. — Khaled Hosseini
Laila lay there and listened, wishing Mammy would notice that she, Laila, hadn't become shaheed, that she was alive, here, in bed with her, that she had hopes and a future. But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers' past. They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death. Mammy was now the curator of their lives' museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor. A receptacle for their myths. The parchment on which Mammy meant to ink their legends. — Khaled Hosseini
There is only one sin. and that is theft ... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth. — Khaled Hosseini
It always hurts more to have and loose than not to have in first place — Khaled Hosseini
But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't. — Khaled Hosseini
If I ever do get married," Tariq said, "they'll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head — Khaled Hosseini
But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man. — Khaled Hosseini
Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile. — Khaled Hosseini
The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems. — Khaled Hosseini
Her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head. — Khaled Hosseini
I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write. — Khaled Hosseini
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
Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That 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 people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us. — Khaled Hosseini
Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing [ ... ] and you will find all manner of dishonor. — Khaled Hosseini
Children s are not the coloring books where you can fill your favorite colors — Khaled Hosseini
I see you've confused what you're learning in school with actual education. — Khaled Hosseini
In every corridor Parwana would see men's eyes snapping to attention when Masooma passed by. She saw their efforts to behave matter-of-factly, but their gazes lingered, helpless to tear away. If Masooma glanced in their direction, they looked idiotically privileged. They imagined they had shared a moment with her. She interrupted conversations midsentence, smokers mid-drag. She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups. Some days it was all too much for Masooma, as if she was almost ashamed, and she told Parwana she wanted to stay inside all day, wanted not to be looked at. On those days, Parwana thought it was as though, somewhere deep inside, her sister understood dimly that her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head. Most days, however, the attention seemed to please her. Most days, she relished her power to derail a man's thoughts with a single fleeting but strategic smile, to make tongues falter over words. — Khaled Hosseini
I watched Baba's car pull away from the curb, taking with it the person whose first spoken word had been my name. — Khaled Hosseini
If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story. — Khaled Hosseini
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth. — Khaled Hosseini
Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir — Khaled Hosseini
It's a half bridge, really, as only four of its original arches remain. It ends midway across the river. Like it reached, tried to reunite with, the other side and fell short. — Khaled Hosseini
Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980's: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck. — Khaled Hosseini
Swear, since seeing Your face, the whole world is fraud and fantasy. The garden is bewildered as to what is leaf or blossom. The distracted birds can't distinguish the birdseed from the snare. — Khaled Hosseini
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
God Has a reason — Khaled Hosseini
You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does. — Khaled Hosseini