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 HOSSEINIIt’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
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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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is God help him.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
I’m gladly doing my own thing for the time being.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
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 sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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 -
Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
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 -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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 -
A 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.
KHALED HOSSEINI






