Khaled Hosseini Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

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.

Khaled Hosseini
Dr. Bashiri, if I ever want to put a curse in someone, I say, 'May God give you a restaurant.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

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

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

Khaled Hosseini
Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn't bypass you, Laila.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

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

Khaled Hosseini
If the story had been about anyone else, it would been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate —sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school.

Khaled Hosseini
A gold pendent with stars and moons hanging from it.

Khaled Hosseini
You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is.. God help him.

Khaled Hosseini
As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

Khaled Hosseini
Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

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

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.

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

Khaled Hosseini
In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.

Khaled Hosseini
It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

Khaled Hosseini
It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. 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. Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

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

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

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.

Khaled Hosseini
Tell your secrets to the wind but don't blame it for telling the trees.

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

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

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

Khaled Hosseini