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 HOSSEINIA 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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.
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Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
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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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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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It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.
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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.
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What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
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War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
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I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.
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As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.
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Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
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Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
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But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
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Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
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Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
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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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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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For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
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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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Yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism.
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There is a way to be good again.
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True redemption is when guilt leads to good.
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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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And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.
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I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.
KHALED HOSSEINI