There is only one sin. and that is theft. When you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
KHALED HOSSEINIShe 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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
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He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
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There is a way to be good again.
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And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.
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I’ve read that if an avalanche buries you and you’re lying there underneath all that snow, you can’t tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.
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What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
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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.
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And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.
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True redemption is when guilt leads to good.
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A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.
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When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.
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It’s tremendous what can happen when suddenly you make an emotional connection.
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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 -
I’ve read that if an avalanche buries you and you’re lying there underneath all that snow, you can’t tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
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And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
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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.
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Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
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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.
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I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.
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Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
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I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
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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.
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Everyone is an ocean inside. Every individual walking the street. Everyone is a universe of thoughts, and insights, and feelings. But every person is crippled in his or her own way by our inability to truly present ourselves to the world.
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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.
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The problem, of course, was that [he] 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