Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

He scarcely knew who was battling whom, who was winning, who was losing, as though he hoped that by doggedly ignoring the war it would return the favor

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.

There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. 'It wasn't meant to be', Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.

You have to do it now. If you wait until morning, you'll lose heart.

That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

So it would begin. The obligatory questions, the perfunctory answers. Both pretending. Unenthusiastic partners, the two of them, in this tired old dance.

The lucky ones, the ones who weren't here when the place was getting bombed to hell. We're not like these people. We shouldn't pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we're not entitled to them.

there is a field.

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.

Rahim, a boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.

Listening to them, I realized how much of who I was, what I was, had been defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people's lives. My whole life, I had been "Baba's son." Now he was gone. Baba couldn't show me the way anymore; I'd have to find it on my own. The thought of it terrified me.

This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.

He had a frozen, wide-eyed look to his face, I remember, the way some old people do, like they are perpetually startled by the monstrous surprise that is old age.

Where I come from, one wrong look, one improper word, and blood is spilled. Where I come from, a woman's face is her husband's business only.

Tariq snapped the magazine back into his handgun. Do you have it in you? Laila said. To what? To use this thing. To kill with it. 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.

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

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?

Alas, Abdullah and Pari, Baba Ayub's days of happiness came to an end.

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... Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

YüreÄŸi çöküverdi, ta ayaklar?n?n dibine kadar.

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.

Sea Prayer was inspired by the story of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach the Safety in Europe in 2015. In the year after Alan's death, 4,176 others died or went missing attempting that same journey.

When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth.