Top 422 Quotes & Sayings by Khaled Hosseini - Page 5

I guess some stories do not need telling.

You are never alone in Afghanistan. You are always in the company of others, usually family. You don't understand yourself really as an individual, you understand yourself as part of something bigger than yourself. Family is so central to your identity, to how you make sense of your world, it is very dramatic, and therefore an amazing source of storytelling, a source of fiction for me.

Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her.

Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can't breathe then, like someone's stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.

If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.

The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.

I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.

I found myself sitting at the computer, and I thought I was going to write a kind of simple nostalgic story about two boys and their love of kite fighting. But stories have a will of their own, and this one turned out to be this dark tale about betrayal, loss, regret. The short story which was about 25 pages long sat around for a couple of years.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

Life is a train, get on board.

The film [Kite Runner] was not as big a hit in the United States as it was worldwide, I think it may have been swallowed up by all the other movies it had to go up against.

she held her breath, and in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

I think the changes that have happened, there have been come positive, but by and large, you have to say the changes have been negative. The situation has reached a fairly critical stage in Afghanistan.

If my book generates any sort of dialogue among Afghans, then I think it will have done a service to the community.

Must have been quite the culture shock, going there.” “Yes it was.” Idris doesn’t say that the real culture shock has been in coming back.

It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.

You’re not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.

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

The [George W.] Bush administration tripled its aid package to Afghanistan. [Hamid] Karzai finally (and courageously) announced that warlords will be forbidden from holding office in the future government. And finally, NATO agreed to expand the peacekeeping forces to troubled areas outside of Kabul.

[Barack Obama] is sending more troops [to Afghanistan], but they have also realized that we are not going to win that war through guns and tanks. We have to engage the neighbors, and it is good that there is a non-military strategy in addition to a military strategy. It is, at least, encouraging. Whether it will work or not, the jury is still put.

All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I’ve ever written was because I don’t have a choice. I write stories because I can’t wait to tell it, I can’t wait to see how it ends.

I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing. So what I know about writing, I know from my own instincts, and whatever the narrative voice is in my own head.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.

Inside Laila too a battle was being waged : guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never see each other again.

Give sustenance, Allah. Give sustenance to me.

Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price?

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.

I loved him in that moment, loved him more than I'd ever loved anyone, and I wanted to to tell them all that I was the snake in the grass, the monster in the lake. I wasn't worthy of this sacrifice; I was a liar, a cheat, a thief. And I would have told, except that a part of me was glad. Glad that this would all be over with soon. Baba would dismiss them, there would be some pain, but life would move on. I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.

If you connect emotionally with the plight of those characters, ou feel what they feel and you walk away with a sense of understanding and empathy, and hopefully, something has been illuminated for you. And I tink that's what happendd for a lot of readers with my novels.

I may not agree with all or even most of the tribal traditions, but it seems ti me that, out there, people live more authentic lives. They have a sturdiness about them. A refreshing humility. Hospitality too. And resilience. A sense of pride.

If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.

Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).

People talk about apathy, especially in developed countries. We're kind of lulled into these tranquil lives, and we are pursuing our own thing and there is so much suffering on a mass scale around the world that you kind of become fatalistic. You might think suffering is inevitable, you kind of lose your sense of moral urgency. But there is always something you can do for someone in the world.

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.

They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.

There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir

I don't know the nuts and bolts of writing. I studied medicine. I was a pre-med nerd. So everything I learned, I know about writing is very instinctive.

It was you Nabi. It was always you. Didn't you know?

sometimes the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but that all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor.

In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life.

We [in The Khaled Hosseini Foundation] support and fund projects that bring jobs, healthcare, and education to women and children. In addition, we award scholarships to women pursuing higher education in Afghanistan.

In 2004, I took a one year sabbatical to finish my second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. At the end of that year, I was not done with my book, and had to in effect resign from work. I did. I never went back.

Now, especially in public places, you always have that unease. When the children were cast, if I thought that they might be victims of violence because of participating in this movie, we would have chosen children from outside this country.

A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver

The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.

Don't be afraid to tell the truth. It's better to hurt someone by truth than to make them happy by lies.

The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

I started a foundation, called The Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The mission has been to help the most vulnerable groups in Afghanistan. So the focus has been on women, children, and homeless refugees, most of whom are in fact women and children.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

I was overwhelmed with the kindness of people [in Afghanistan] and found that they had managed to retain their dignity, their pride, and their hospitality under unspeakably bleak conditions.

[Flying kite with my friends] is one of the seminal memories of growing up for me.

I did see [in Afghanistan] plenty that reminded me of my childhood. I recognised my old neighbourhood, saw my old school, streets where I had played with my brother and cousins.

Even after The Kite Runner was published I continued to practice for another eighteen months. But I had always had a love of writing and a compulsion to do it.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.