Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed (2013)

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

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

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

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

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
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
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 want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

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

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

Khaled Hosseini
The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word 'senseless' springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

Khaled Hosseini
But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

Khaled Hosseini
If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

Khaled Hosseini
He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.

Khaled Hosseini
Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

Khaled Hosseini
A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.

Khaled Hosseini
I may not agree with all or even most of the tribal traditions, but it seems ti me that, out there, people live more authentic lives. They have a sturdiness about them. A refreshing humility. Hospitality too. And resilience. A sense of pride.

Khaled Hosseini
I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.

Khaled Hosseini
They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.

Khaled Hosseini
At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.

Khaled Hosseini