She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you.
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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And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
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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.
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What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
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True redemption is when guilt leads to good.
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There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.
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Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything
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For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
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I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.
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War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
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Some stories don’t need telling.
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Afghanistan has always been sort of a fractured nation, very tribal, where the countryside and the distant provinces have been run by custom, by tribal law and by tribal leaders rather than edicts from the central government in Kabul.
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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 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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Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.
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You can not stop you from being who you are.
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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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Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
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All good things in life are fragile and easily lost.
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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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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.
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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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A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
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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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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.
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I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
KHALED HOSSEINI