Khaled Hosseini Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break. Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975—and all that followed—was already laid in those first words (11).

Khaled Hosseini
Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for most part has been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.

Khaled Hosseini
Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980's: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
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 father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

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

Khaled Hosseini
After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.

Khaled Hosseini
All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.

Khaled Hosseini
What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.

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

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine. Held for a moment. Flew away.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He'd carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he'd pull for us from the tandoor's roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

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

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
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

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could—a look, a whisper, a moan—to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

Khaled Hosseini
It was Homaira and me against the world... In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.

Khaled Hosseini
But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.

Khaled Hosseini
Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock. And

Khaled Hosseini
On a high mountain I stood, And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.

Khaled Hosseini
I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
Time can be a greedy thing — sometimes it steals the details for itself.

Khaled Hosseini
Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.- Rahim Khan

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

Khaled Hosseini
One time, when I was really 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.

Khaled Hosseini