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

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

I started a foundation, called The Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The mission has been to help the most vulnerable groups in Afghanistan. So the focus has been on women, children, and homeless refugees, most of whom are in fact women and children.

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

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

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.

yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism