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 HOSSEINIShe 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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
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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.
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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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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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People say that eyes are windows to the soul.
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Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
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There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.
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Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock.
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But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
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The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
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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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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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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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Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
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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