Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

the Tariq who did not get headaches, who had once said that in Siberia snot turned to ice before it hit

Quiet is peace. Tranquillity. Quiet is turning down the VOLUME knob on life. Silence is pushing the OFF button. Shutting it down. All of it.

I could begin there, I suppose. Or somewhere else. A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.

Tea, politics, and scandal, the ingredients of an Afghan Sunday at the flea market.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.' Such grace, such dignity, such a tragedy.

I often convinced myself I had no envy of Hassan.

Thalia, I want you to know that you don't have to wear that thing in this house anymore. Not on my account. Nor his. Do it only if it suits you. I have no more to say about this business.

Seseorang yang tidak memiliki kesadaran, tidak memiliki kebaikan, tidak akan pernah menderita.

Now I was free to do as I wished, but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken from me. They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and adrift.

thought, She's your wife. My mother, we buried. But he knew to stifle those words before they came

That was the thing with Hassan. He was so goddamn pure, you always felt like a phony around him.

Bravo, Amir. You're a good son.

But better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

a face as suggestive of early maturity as his brother's was of lingering boyishness.

I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on. Laila thinks of her own life and all that has happened to her, and she is astonished that she too has survived, that she is alive and sitting in this taxi listening to this man's story.

I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who i was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan- the way he'd stood up for me all those times in the past- and accept whatever would happen to me. or I could run. In the end, I ran.

It would be the dripping faucet at the back of her mind.

Like a compass facing north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

This was the illness my father was carrying around with him.

And they call themselves Muslims, he whispered.

Dan inilah yang aku inginkan untuk kau pahami bahwa kebaikan, kebaikan yang nyata, muncul akibat rasa bersalah.

Then she realizes the letters are Russian. There is a deserted bird's nest in one corner and a bat hanging upside down in another corner, where the wall meets the low ceiling. Laila closes her eyes and sits there awhile.

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life. 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 truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

It was in the tender, slightly panicky way he spoke these words that I knew my father was a wounded person, that his love for me was as true, vast and permanent as the sky, and that it would always bear down upon me. It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.