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 HOSSEINII 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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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 HOSSEINI -
It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
There is a way to be good again.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
True redemption is when guilt leads to good.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
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 -
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 -
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 -
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
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