Khaled Hosseini Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

Hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.

Khaled Hosseini
Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
I brought Hassan's son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

Khaled Hosseini
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

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

Khaled Hosseini
If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thous didst it of thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting.

Khaled Hosseini
I think that everything he did, feeding the poor, giving money to friends in need, it was all a way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

Khaled Hosseini
Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price?

Khaled Hosseini
She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and sometimes not.

Khaled Hosseini
A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

Khaled Hosseini
He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ''For you a thousand times over!'' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.

Khaled Hosseini
I stepped back and all I saw was rain through windowpanes that looked like melting silver.

Khaled Hosseini
In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.

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

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

Khaled Hosseini
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
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.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini