Khaled Hosseini Quotes

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

For you, a thousand times over

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime...

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.

Marriage can wait, education cannot.

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated...

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

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.

A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.

There is a way to be good again...

Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything

When you kill a man, you steal a life. 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.

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.

It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

She said, 'I'm so afraid.' And I said, 'why?,' and she said, 'Because I'm so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.' I asked her why and she said, 'They only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

she is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir

Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.

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

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

War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.

I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.

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. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.

some stories don't need telling

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.

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.

You've always been a tourist here. You just didn't know it.

All good things in life are fragile and easily lost

A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.

I'm so afraid. Because I'm so profoundly happy. Happiness like this is frightening...They only let you this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.

But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I 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.

Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought into making you.

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.

One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life... you steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a ather. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness... there is no act more wretched than stealing.

You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.

yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism

Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).

and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.

Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.

The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.

Miriam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings.

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

Sad stories make good books

It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.

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

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.

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.

I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.

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

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

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

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.

there is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him... there is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He will forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need. I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is.

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

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

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

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

The finger cut, to save the hand.

‎I know you're still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that 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. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.

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.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

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.

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion--like the phantom pain of an amputee.

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll's head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila's salvation. The little girl looks up. Puts the doll down. Smiles.