Quotes from Khaled Hosseini

Was there happiness at the end [of the movie], they wanted to know. If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn't know what to say. Does anybody's? After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Afghans like to say: Life goes on, undmindful of beginning, en, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis.

She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice,hope, a treacherous illusion.

America was different. America was a river, roarng along, unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.

No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.

Regret... when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.

Zindagi migzara (life goes on)

The Chinese say it's better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you'd live to be a hundred years old. I didn't know. I didn't know that you were ashamed of me.

People…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 don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.

She wished she could visit Mariam's grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn't matter. Mariam is never very far.... Mariam is in her own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.

Some days, I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks, all the minutes, all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without you. And I can't breathe then, like someone's stepping on my heart. I get so weak. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything - that is how, it is between people who are each other's first memories

Rahim Khan laughed. "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.

If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.

Look at me, Mariam.' Reluctantly, Mariam did. Nana said, 'Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

I think he loved us equally, but differently.

it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.

You're not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.

The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word 'senseless' springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

If I ever do get married, Tariq said, they'll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head