Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

The air is heavy with sickness. It's not quite a smell; rather, it's like a physical presence. Every doctor knows this. Sickness permeates a room like steam.

Vous le savez bien, nous autres Afghans adorons notre poésie. Même les moins instruits peuvent réciter des vers de Hafez, de Khayyam ou de Saadi. Vous rappelez-vous, monsieur Markus, lorsque vous m'avez dit l'année dernière combien vous aimiez les Afghans? Je vous ai demandé pourquoi et vous m'avez répondu en riant : parce que même vos tagueurs citent Rumi sur les murs.

For you, a thousand times and over.

I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone.

His parents were executed in the street. The neighbors saw it. You have death certificates? - Death certificates? This is Afghanistan we're talking about. Most people there don't have birth certificates.

big hazel eyes...she had this laugh... I can still hear it sometimes.

And so Mariam raised the shovel high, raised it as high as she could, arching it so it touched the small of her back. She turned it so the sharp edge was vertical, and, as she did, it occurred to her that this was the first time she was deciding the course of her own life. And, with that, Mariam brought down the shovel. This time, she gave it everything she had.

Then,mercifully darkness.

A jeep honked and Tariq whistled back, beaming and waving cheerfully. Lovely guns! he yelled. Fabulous jeeps! Fabulous army! Too bad you're losing to a bunch of peasants firing slingshots!

Ah, a storyteller," the general said. "Well, people need stories to divert them at difficult times like this.

From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?" "That I only have eyes for you." Laila

a brushstroke of color on the gray,barren canvas

should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.

heard enough. I berated them for gossiping

That's how children deal with terror. They fall asleep. I

That's your business, isn't it, cousin? To make nothing your business. Even your own sons going to war. How I pleaded with you. But you buried your nose in those cursed books and let our sons go like they were a pair of haramis.

La corda che ti salva dall'inondazione può diventare un cappio attorno al collo.

América era distinta. América era un río que descendía con gran estruendo, inconsciente del pasado. Y yo podía vadear ese río, dejar que mis pecados se hundieran en el fondo, dejar que las aguas me arrastraran hacia algún lugar lejano. Algún lugar sin fantasmas, sin recuerdos y sin pecados.

I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, insanely, and without recourse

but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir," he said.

Giti was killed, collecting pieces of her daughter's flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically. Giti's decomposing right foot, still in its nylon sock and purple sneaker, would be found on a rooftop two weeks later. At Giti's fatiha, the day after the killings, Laila sat stunned in a roomful of weeping women. This was the first time that someone whom Laila had known, been close to, loved, had died.

I wondered how and when I'd become capable of causing this kind of pain.

There was so much goodness in my life.So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

It had struck her as comically officious then, hearing his full name uttered.