Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
KHALED HOSSEINIOf all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
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.
KHALED HOSSEINIWhat good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
KHALED HOSSEINILife 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.
KHALED HOSSEINII 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.
KHALED HOSSEINIOne could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
KHALED HOSSEINIAfghanistan 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 HOSSEINIIt’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.
KHALED HOSSEINII’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 HOSSEINIPerhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
KHALED HOSSEINII 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.
KHALED HOSSEINIThere is a way to be good again.
KHALED HOSSEINIWhen 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 HOSSEINIPeople say that eyes are windows to the soul.
KHALED HOSSEINIBehind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
KHALED HOSSEINIYet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism.
KHALED HOSSEINI