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.
KHALED HOSSEINII 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.
More Khaled Hosseini Quotes
-
-
True redemption is when guilt leads to good.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
You can not stop you from being who you are.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
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 -
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 -
Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
It’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 HOSSEINI -
Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
Some stories don’t need telling.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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.
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 -
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.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
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 HOSSEINI -
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.
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 -
What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
KHALED HOSSEINI -
She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.
KHALED HOSSEINI