Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (2003)

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It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

Khaled Hosseini
It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

Khaled Hosseini
I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

Khaled Hosseini
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

Khaled Hosseini
Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.

Khaled Hosseini
As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

Khaled Hosseini
You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is.. God help him.

Khaled Hosseini
If the story had been about anyone else, it would been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate —sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school.

Khaled Hosseini
It is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.

Khaled Hosseini
If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.

Khaled Hosseini
I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great

Khaled Hosseini
Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.

Khaled Hosseini
You've always been a tourist here. You just didn't know it.

Khaled Hosseini
But coming close wasn't the same as winning, was it?... He had won because winners won and everyone else just went home.

Khaled Hosseini
If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.

Khaled Hosseini
It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.

Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It always has been, always will be. We are the true Afghans, the pure Afghans, not this Flat-Nose here. His people pollute our homeland, our watan. They dirty our blood.

Khaled Hosseini