Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think. A

Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman.

sometimes the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but that all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor.

Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.

Mostly, though, I dream of good things...I dream that flowers will bloom in the streets..again and music will play in the...houses and kites will fly in the skies.

Mariam is in Laila's own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.

She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How shr could ever cope with his permanent absence?

The moment is brief, barely enough for a flutter of the pulse but long enough for her illusory self to catch up with the reality of the woman gazing back from the shopwindow. It is a little devastating. This is what ageing is, she thinks as she follows Isabelle into the store, these random unkind moments that catch you when you least expect them.

I suspect the truth is we are waiting, all of us, against unsurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

Thinking of the anguish of his final days and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you're going to sleep, the ones you've already forgotten by the time you wake up.

Their fights didn't so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered.

Bareh tu hazar dafa!

Biliyorsun. Neyi biliyorum? Gözlerimin sadece seni gördüÄŸünü.

Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence.

And here she was now, over those boulders and parched hills, with a home of her own, a husband of her own, heading toward on final, cherished province: Motherhood. How delectable it was to think of this baby, her baby, their baby. How glorious it was to know that her love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being, to know that there was no need any longer for pebble games.

cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.

Zendagi migzara, we say, life goes on.

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.

Mamà believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. She also believed it was always best to tell the truth, to tell it plainly, without fanfare, and the more disagreeable the truth, the sooner you had to tell it.

Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, Laila had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which Tariq's father sometimes played old Pashto songs, time stretched and contracted depending on Tariq's absence or presence.

Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.

To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things.

Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed

I was not altogether surprised to learn that she had taken her own life. I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.