Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

It was you Nabi. It was always you. Didn't you know?

And I wrote you. Volumes. Volumes.

What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.

After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.

A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver

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.

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.

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?

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

Give sustenance, Allah. Give sustenance to me.

I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.

Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.

You know. Know what? That I only have eyes for you.

And one more thing...You will never again refer to him as 'Hazara boy' in my presence. He has a name and it's Sohrab.

In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.

Awake. And alone with demons of my own.

There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir

She would grab whatever she could - a look, a whisper, a moan - to salvage from perishing, to preserve. But time is most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all .

All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.

Hassan returned the smile. Except his didn't look forced. And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too

There will be no floating waway. There will be no other reality tonight.

A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.