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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

End Novel Play Purpose Role Thinking Understand Writing
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
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Extraordinary Truth Wait
I finally had what I’d wanted all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Empty Gratitude Legs Loss Missing Myself
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
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

Black Decision Fear Hate Himself Live Love Person Problem See White World
Some stories don’t need telling.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Need One Liner Story Talk
But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Charm Deep Thinking Time Wisdom Yourself
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Bloom Fade Flower Live Spring
War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Demand Peace Time War
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

Life Peace Quiet Silence Tranquility
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Fiction Greatness Lying Truth Writing
Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Action Deep Heart Punishment Understand
It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Hurt Lose Place Wisdom
But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Charm Deep Thinking Time Wisdom Yourself
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
A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Brave Courage Coward Man Stand Strength Voice
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

Bury Lying Reading Wrong Yourself
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

Life Peace Quiet Silence Tranquility
Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Boy Direction Enjoyment Friendship See Sun Treat
Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
KHALED HOSSEINI

God Himself Reason Sorrow
When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Children Deep Fair Father Husband Kill Life Lying Man Right Spiritual Theft Truth Wife Yourself
You can not stop you from being who you are.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Be Yourself Stop
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
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
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI

Ability Feeling Ocean Ourselves Path Person Present Thinking True Universe Walk World
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

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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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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Popular Authors

More Khaled Hosseini Quotes