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.
KHALED HOSSEINIFor courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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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 HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
The 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 HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
But then it passed, as all things do.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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 -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI