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 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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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 -
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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A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.
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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 HOSSEINI -
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 -
A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
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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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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 -
It’s tremendous what can happen when suddenly you make an emotional connection.
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But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
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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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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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It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.
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Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
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At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.
KHALED HOSSEINI