Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
KHALED HOSSEINIYou’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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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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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Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
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But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
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You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.
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You can not stop you from being who you are.
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Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.
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She 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.
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It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
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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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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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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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War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
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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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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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For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
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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.
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People say that eyes are windows to the soul.
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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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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.
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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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But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
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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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Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
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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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She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.
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There is a way to be good again.
KHALED HOSSEINI