Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything
KHALED HOSSEINIYears later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
-
-
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.
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 -
A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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 -
There is only one sin. and that is theft. When you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
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 -
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 -
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 -
You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is God help him.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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 -
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
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 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 -
War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
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