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 HOSSEINIEveryone 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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.
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Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
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Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.
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But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
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You can not stop you from being who you are.
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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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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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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.
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What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
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Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock.
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Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
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Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
KHALED HOSSEINI