Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.

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.

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

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.

I have very fond memories of my childhood in Afghanistan, largely because my memories, unlike those of the current generation of Afghans, are untainted by the spectre of war, landmines, and famine.

I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history.

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

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

Life just doesn't care about our aspirations, or sadness. It's often random, and it's often stupid and it's often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.

Everything for me starts very small and snowballs. So I rarely start with the grand idea and find a place for it and narrow down. It's, really, just start small, and as I'm writing it, I begin to see - sometimes to my own surprise - what's unfolding and what's blooming.

the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion

In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.

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

The story of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, however, is a very important one, and fertile ground for fiction.

Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn't bypass you, Laila.

My own background is fairly liberal and so this notion of 'protecting women from outside intrusion' is not in my nature, nor in my upbringing.

We will also be funding projects that empower women and children in Afghanistan and now and then give scholarships to Afghan students here in the Bay Area.

Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.

I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.