Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.

Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.

Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. For you, he said. I'd kill with it for you, Laila.

And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.

Tell your secret to the wind, but don't blame it for telling the trees.

Life is a train, get on board.

That's how children deal with terror, they fall asleep.

It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer.

Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.

She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because 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, swelled and crashed.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

The finger cut, to save the hand.

And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.

And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and 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.

I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.