Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (2003)

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And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.

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

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

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

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
But that's what I'm saying to you... That there are bad people in this world, and sometimes bad people stay bad. Sometimes you have to stand up to them.

Khaled Hosseini
Hassan slumps to the asphalt, his life of unrequited loyalty drifting from him like the windblown kites he used to chase.

Khaled Hosseini
He knew I'd seen everything in that alley, that I'd stood there and done nothing. He knew that I'd betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.

Khaled Hosseini
I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

Khaled Hosseini
I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn't I? The least I could have done was to have the decency to have turned out a little more like him.

Khaled Hosseini
I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn't.

Khaled Hosseini
Hassan's not going anywhere. He's staying right here with us, where he belongs. This is his home and we're his family. Don't you ever ask me that question again!

Khaled Hosseini
If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar.

Khaled Hosseini
I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But I didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the valley of Panjsher on my lips. I ran.

Khaled Hosseini
He had the blue kite in his hands; that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips.

Khaled Hosseini
I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.

Khaled Hosseini
There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

Khaled Hosseini
That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

Khaled Hosseini
Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything.

Khaled Hosseini
Baba dropped the stack of food stamps on her desk. "Thank you but I don't want," Baba said. "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don't like it free money."...Baba walked out of the welfare office like a man cured of a tumor.

Khaled Hosseini
You don't order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them 'sister' the next.

Khaled Hosseini
We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born...

Khaled Hosseini
It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.

Khaled Hosseini
All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.

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

Khaled Hosseini
The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.

Khaled Hosseini