I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.
KHALED HOSSEINIBoys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.
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Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism.
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Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.
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It’s tremendous what can happen when suddenly you make an emotional connection.
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Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
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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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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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A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
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Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything
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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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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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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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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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Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
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I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
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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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Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
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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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Some stories don’t need telling.
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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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For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
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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 finally had what I’d wanted all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.
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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 should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.
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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.
KHALED HOSSEINI