K Hosseini Quotes & Sayings

I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the world moves towards something messier and more complicated, and once it does you can never go back. — Khaled Hosseini

True redemption is...when guilt leads to good. — Khaled Hosseini

I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great — Khaled Hosseini

James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too? — Khaled Hosseini

It was you Nabi. It was always you. Didn't you know? — Khaled Hosseini

If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar. — Khaled Hosseini

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval. — 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

There is only one sin. and that is theft ... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth. — Khaled Hosseini

Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors. — Khaled Hosseini

Usually in films, when Muslims pray, it's either before or after they've blown something up. — Khaled Hosseini

People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections. — Khaled Hosseini

Could unsheathe from her arsenal a mockingly grave way of talking about things she found either portentous or frivolous. She could shrink your aspirations before your very eyes. — 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

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be. — Khaled Hosseini

In the middle of the night, when Laila woke up thirsty, she found their hands still clamped together, in the white-knuckle, anxious way of children clutching balloon strings. — Khaled Hosseini

Hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon. — Khaled Hosseini

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

Shoes: that putting them on a bed invited death into the family, that a quarrel would follow if one put on the left shoe first. — Khaled Hosseini

And I wrote you.
Volumes.
Volumes. — Khaled Hosseini

Happiness like this is frightening ... they only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something away from you — Khaled Hosseini

Give sustenance, Allah.
Give sustenance to me. — 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

Lili lili birdbath
sitting on a dirtpath
minnow sat on the rim and drank
slipped and in the water she sank — Khaled Hosseini

She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups. — 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

My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters. — Khaled Hosseini

That there was in her life the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence. Sometimes it was vague, like a message sent across shadowy byways and vast distances, a weak signal on a radio dial, remote, warbled. Other times it felt so clear, this absence, so intimately close it made her heart lurch. — Khaled Hosseini

It feels as though there is a gaping hole in the middle of everything. The decades of my mother's life here with Thalia, they are dark, vast spaces to me. I have been absent. Absent for all the meals Thalia and Mama have shared at this table, the laughs, the quarrels, the stretches of boredom, the illnesses, the long string of simple rituals that make up a lifetime. Entering my child-hood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel that I'd started, then abandoned, long ago. — Khaled Hosseini