Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

Vindication. Salvation. Redemption. And then? Well... happily ever after, of course. What else?

Marriage can wait, education cannot... Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.

I remembered how, as a boy, I would stew over all the things Mamá wouldn't do, things other mothers did. Hold my hand when we walked. Sit me up on her lap, read bedtime stories, kiss my face good night. Those things were true enough. But, all those years, I'd been blind to a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me.

Madlaline's stories stirred up an old restlessness in me, an urge I'd always had to strike out headlong into the world, to be dauntless. By comparison my own life seemed crushingly ordinary. I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness…feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer more hollow self.

Aku melarikan diri karena aku adalah seorang pengecut.

there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that? 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?

For you a thousand times over. . . Dostet darum. I love you.

One last time, Mariam did as she was told.

He caminado mucho y desde muy lejos para ver si eres tan bello en la realidad como lo eras en mis sueños.

Ma gandesc la el acum, necajit si pierdut, clatinandu-se pe picioare prin desert, iar pe poteca din spatele lui se afla toate acele bucati marunte si stralucitoare pe care viata le-a luat de la el.

me pregunté si el perdón se manifestaría de esa manera, sin la fanfarria de la revelación, si simplemente el dolor recogería sus cosas, haría las maletas y se esfumaría sin decir nada en mitad de la noche.

Não se podem contar as luas que brilham sobre os seus telhados, nem os mil sóis resplandecentes que se escondem por trás dos seus muros

After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end, kamyab, nah-­Ã¢â'¬Âkam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis.

Lalu dia akan mengingatkan kami tentang ikatan persaudaraan bagi orang-orang satu susuan, ikatan persaudaraan yang tak akan bisa diputuskan, bahkan oleh waktu.

It was a look I had seen before. It was the look of the lamb.

Aku telah pergi cukup lama untuk melupakan dan dilupakan.

Here is another cliché my creative writing teacher would have scoffed at: like father, like son. But it was true, wasn't it? As it turned out, Baba and I were more alike than I'd ever known. We had both betrayed the people who would have given their lives for us.

I understood the nature of my curse: I was going to get away with it.

Laila knows, to those who grumble that the promised aid money to Afghanistan isn't coming, that the rebuilding is going too slowly, that there is corruption, that the Taliban are regrouping already and will come back with a vengeance, that the world will forget once again about Afghanistan.

You're still the morning sun to my yelda, Dostet darum. I love you.

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're already forgotten by the time you wake up

El silencio de Sohrab no era el silencio que alguien se impone a sí mismo por determinadas convicciones, ni el de los manifestantes que reivindican su causa sin pronunciar palabra. Era el silencio de quien se ha refugiado en un escondrijo oscuro, de quien se ha hecho un ovillo y se ha ocultado.

But in my quiet moments, in those long rides in the back of a bus or the bed of a truck, my mind always circles back to…

In Caracas I sleep under a bridge. A youth hostel in Brussels. Sometimes I splurge and rent a room in a nice hotel, take long hot showers, shave, eat meals in bathrobe. I watch color TB, the eighties, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet- they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more am more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.