Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
KHALED HOSSEINIOf all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
KHALED HOSSEINILife just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness. It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.
KHALED HOSSEINIWhat good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
KHALED HOSSEINIThe 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 HOSSEINIA sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
KHALED HOSSEINIA boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.
KHALED HOSSEINIBut time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
KHALED HOSSEINIThere is a way to be good again.
KHALED HOSSEINIThe desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
KHALED HOSSEINIAfghanistan 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.
KHALED HOSSEINIIt 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.
KHALED HOSSEINISome stories don’t need telling.
KHALED HOSSEINIAnd 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.
KHALED HOSSEINII’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 HOSSEINIA man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
KHALED HOSSEINII’m gladly doing my own thing for the time being.
KHALED HOSSEINI