Khaled Hosseini Quotes

You say their stories, it is gift they give you.

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.

You don't have to donate money, it can be clothes, or books, or mediavl supplies. So there's so much that can be done [for refugees], the most difficult thing is that first step that decision to do something.

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.

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.

Was there happiness at the end [of the movie], they wanted to know. If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn't know what to say. Does anybody's? After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Afghans like to say: Life goes on, undmindful of beginning, en, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis.

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.

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.

I returned to Afghanistan because I had a deep longing to see for myself how people lived, what they thought of their government, how optimistic they were about the future of their homeland.

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.

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.

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

There are so many orgizations that do amazing work. I represent not only my own foundation, but the UN Refugee Agency, which has been around since 1951, and has helped 30 million refugees around the world.

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

I have this almost pathological fear of boring the reader.

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

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.

Those who saw Kite Runner loved the film, for the most part, people seemed to really like the film.

People talk about apathy, especially in developed countries. We're kind of lulled into these tranquil lives, and we are pursuing our own thing and there is so much suffering on a mass scale around the world that you kind of become fatalistic. You might think suffering is inevitable, you kind of lose your sense of moral urgency. But there is always something you can do for someone in the world.

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.

Life is a train, get on board.

Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can't breathe then, like someone's stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.

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

I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S.

If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thous didst it of thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting.

She would grab whatever she could -a look , a whisper , a moan - to salvage from perishing , to perserve. But time is most unforgivving of fires , and she couldn't , in the end , save it all .

Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).

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

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.

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

There [in Afghanistan ] is a tremendous need for selter. So I am focusing most of the efforts of the foundation to building shelters for refugees in northern Afghanistan and we have already begun doing so.

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir

[Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns] is not just unique to books, but films and music.

There [in The Kite Runner] certainly are, as is always the case with fiction, autobiographical elements woven through the narrative.

President Karzai is an incredibly kind and decent man. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he genuinely cares for his people. But I think he had too much of a tendency to want to rule by listening to all voices at all times.

People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections.

My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write.

My books are about ordinary people, like you, me, people on the street, people who really have an expectation of reasonable happiness in life, want their life to have a sense of security and predictability, who want to belong to something bigger than them, who want love and affection in their life, who want a good future for the children.

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.

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.

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

Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.

There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again. I was entirely absorbed in that world as I wrote the book [The Kite Runner] and to see the final page of that manuscript whir out of the printer was a very special feeling indeed.

In early 1999, I was watching TV, when I came across a story on Afghanistan. It was a story about the Taliban and the restrictions they were imposing on the Afghan people, most notably women. At some point in the story, there was a casual reference to them having banned the game of kite fighting. This detail struck a personal chord with me, as I had grown up in Kabul flying kite with my friends.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.