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 HOSSEINIYears later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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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.
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Hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.
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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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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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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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Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.
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It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.
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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.
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But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
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A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
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Afghanistan has always been sort of a fractured nation, very tribal, where the countryside and the distant provinces have been run by custom, by tribal law and by tribal leaders rather than edicts from the central government in Kabul.
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One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
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The experience of writing ‘The Kite Runner’ is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.
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What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
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Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
KHALED HOSSEINI