But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
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.
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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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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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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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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It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.
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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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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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Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
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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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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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But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
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There is only one sin. and that is theft. When you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
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Some stories don’t need telling.
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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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Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
KHALED HOSSEINI