Khaled Hosseini Quotes

Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

~ Khaled Hosseini

In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.

~ 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 had the blue kite in his hands, that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.

~ Khaled Hosseini

She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up into the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke silently on the people below- As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us

~ Khaled Hosseini

I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it did not care a whit about the hopes and reams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.

~ Khaled Hosseini

I welcome you to my home as my son, as the husband of my daughter who is the noor of my eye. Your pain will be our pain, your joy our joy. I hope that you will come to see your Khala and Jamila and me as a second set of parents, and I pray for your and our lovely Soraya jan's happiness. you both have our blessings.

~ Khaled Hosseini

I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!

~ 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

you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.

~ Khaled Hosseini

it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.

~ Khaled Hosseini

That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does.

~ Khaled Hosseini

He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn't. It spilled out of her, came pouring out her eyes.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper-thin slice of intersection between those spheres.

~ Khaled Hosseini

I wondered when I had forgotten that, despite everything, he was still just a child.

~ Khaled Hosseini

She will not plant the seed in their mind, that a parent is capable of abandoning her children, of saying to them You are not enough. For Pari, the children and Eric have always been enough. They always will be.

~ Khaled Hosseini

When Aziza first spotted Mariam in the morning, her eyes always sprang open, and she began mewling and squirming in her mother's grip. She thrust her arms toward Mariam, demanding to be held, her tiny hands opening and closing urgently, on her face a look of both adoration and quivering anxiety...Why have you pinned your little heart to an old, ugly hag like me? Mariam would murmur into Aziza's hair... What have I got to give you?But Aziza only muttered contentedly and dug her face in deeper. And when she did that, Mariam swooned. Her eyes watered. Her heart took flight. And she marveled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.

~ Khaled Hosseini

A society has no chance of success if it's women are uneducated.

~ Khaled Hosseini

I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.

~ Khaled Hosseini

I would have told them that he lived a life lacking in purpose or direction. Like those aimless rides I took him on. A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by. An indifferent life.

~ Khaled Hosseini

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel.

~ 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

Come. There is a way to be good again...

~ Khaled Hosseini

... I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariam jo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that I let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so-called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps that is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariam jo. Forgive me, forgive me. Forgive me...

~ Khaled Hosseini

I know that in the end, God will forgive me. He will forgive your father, me, and you too. I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive me if you wish. But most important, forgive yourself.

~ Khaled Hosseini

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion--like the phantom pain of an amputee.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. 'It wasn't meant to be', Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren’t sad?Because it was nobody’s business if I was.

~ Khaled Hosseini

A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bare to lose.

~ Khaled Hosseini

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which sometimes played old Pashto songs were played, time stretched and contracted depending on his absence or presence.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which old Pashto songs were sometimes played, time stretched and contracted depending on his absence or presence.

~ Khaled Hosseini

She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How she could ever cope with his permanent absence?

~ Khaled Hosseini

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... 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

I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.

~ Khaled Hosseini

I've crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they're all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a little bit of charm-- Or a lot -- and that can fool you. But really they're all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven't been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it's a mistake to give it to them. They can't accept it. They can't accept the very thing they're needing. They end up hating you for it. And it never ends because they can't hate you enough. It never ends-- the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all. My first husband was like that.

~ Khaled Hosseini

James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?

~ Khaled Hosseini

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But they are things that, well, you just have to see and feel. p.147

~ Khaled Hosseini

Nothing came out. Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above.

~ Khaled Hosseini