Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
Inside Laila too a battle was being waged : guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never see each other again.

Khaled Hosseini
The Chinese say it's better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.

Khaled Hosseini
I'm all you have in this world Mariam, and when I'm gone you'll have nothing. You ARE nothing!

Khaled Hosseini
Mariam is never very far, she is here, in these walls they've repainted, in the trees they've planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils. She is in the children's laughter. She is in the verses Aziza recites and in the prayers she mutters when she bows westward. But, mostly, Miriam is in Laila's own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.

Khaled Hosseini
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.

Khaled Hosseini
A man's heart isn't like a woman's womb! It won't bleed, it won't make room for you. A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing.

Khaled Hosseini