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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

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

Change Improvement Internet Invention Joke Laughter Old War
True redemption is when guilt leads to good.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Goodness Guilty Leadership Transformation True
They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Deep Life Live Mindset Past Purpose Recognition Yourself
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Bury Deep Learning Past Wrong
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Empty Night Place Reality Rise Summer Tears Throat
I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Charity Heart Humility Judgement Live Person See Time Well
But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Comfortable Hurt Lying Truth
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Count Herself Hide Love Moon Sun Wall Woman
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

English Existence Learning Word
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Beginning Important Life Missing Person Reality Start Story Try Understand Yourself
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Bloom Fade Flower Live Spring
It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Hurt Lose Place Wisdom
Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Fingers Man Oppression Woman
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

Books Feeling Learning See Teaching Yourself
All good things in life are fragile and easily lost.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Easy Fragile Goodness Life Lost
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Alive Deep Family God Gratitude Husband Myself Son Thankful Wife

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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