Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself.

prided myself on knowing that my clever story had given her a bit of reprieve from the discontent of her marriage. She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.

So what i took as a yes from him was in actuality more of a quiet surrender, not much an acceptance as an act of relinquishment by one too weary to decide, and far too tired to believe.

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

Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and wee are a flyspeck in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed.

But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting…

Talvez compreender apenas quando as coisas já não têm remédio seja o castigo justo para os que não tiveram coração.

The loss was hard on Hassan—it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

I wanted to pull him close, hold him, tell him the world had been unkind to him, not the other way around.

Aku ingin memberitahu Ali bahwa bukan buku itu yang tidak pantas dihadiahkan kepadaku, namun akulah yang tidak pantas menerimanya.

will use a flower petal for paper, And write you the sweetest letter, You are the sultan of my heart, the sultan of my heart.

Nothing came out. Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above.

Ojalá recordaras las calles atestadas, con aquel olor a kibbeh frito, y los paseos que dábamos al atardecer con tu madre por la plaza de la Torre del Reloj.

And I also know that when this war is over, Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men, maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.

The past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.

Mariam SEPTEMBER 1997

Jika Tuhan memperhatikan kehidupan kita, kuharap Dia lebih mementingkan hal-hal selain kesukaanku minum scotch dan makan daging babi.

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…Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

Per tu ho faria mil vegades més.

Sometimes Laila wondered why Mammy had even bothered having her. People, she believed now, shouldn't be allowed to have new children if they'd already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn't fair.

I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan.

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

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn't.

each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below.