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 HOSSEINII 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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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Hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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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And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.
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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.
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The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
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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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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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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.
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Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
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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.
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One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
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But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
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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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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






