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 HOSSEINII 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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
Life just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness. It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
I’m gladly doing my own thing for the time being.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
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 -
A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
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 -
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 -
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 -
She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.
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 -
Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything
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






