Khaled Hosseini Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man.

Khaled Hosseini
How could I of all people, chastise someone for their past?

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

Khaled Hosseini
Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her.

Khaled Hosseini
It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.

Khaled Hosseini
People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don't they? Like a badge? I'm being genuine.

Khaled Hosseini
Is this about you and Hassan? I know there's something going on between you two, but whatever it is, you have to deal with it, not me. I'm staying out of it.

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

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
Ali and Sanaubar had little in common, least of all their respective appearances. While Sanaubar's brilliant green eyes and impish face had, rumor has it, tempted countless men into sin, Ali had a congenital paralysis of his lower facial muscles, a condition that rendered him unable to smile and left him perpetually grim-faced. It was an odd thing to see the stone-faced Ali happy, or sad, because only his slanted brown eyes glinted with a smile or welled with sorrow. People say that eyes are windows to the soul. Never was that more true than with Ali, who could only reveal himself through his eyes. I have heard that Sanaubar's suggestive stride and oscillating hips sent men to reveries of infidelity.

Khaled Hosseini
Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not.

Khaled Hosseini
With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba 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.

Khaled Hosseini
Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.

Khaled Hosseini
Sometimes the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but that all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

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

Khaled Hosseini
Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.

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

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