Top 422 Quotes & Sayings by Khaled Hosseini - Page 6

People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.

I don't know whom or what he was defying. [...] [M]aybe the God he had never believed in.

She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and sometimes not.

The bulk of our efforts [in The Khaled Hosseini Foundation] has focused on helping build permanent shelters for returning refugees who are homeless, living out in the open or in makeshift homes. This is an area of urgent need as Afghanistan's natural elements are quite harsh, with very hot summers, and freezing winters.

I experienced Kabul with my brother the way Amir and Hassan do: long school days in the summer, kite fighting in the winter time, westerns with John Wayne at Cinema Park, big parties at our house in Wazir Akbar Khan, picnics in Paghman.

I returned to Kabul after a 27-year absence. I came away with some optimism but not as much as I had hoped for. The two major issues in Afghanistan are a lack of security outside Kabul (particularly in the south and east) and the powerful warlords ruling over the provinces with little or no allegiance to the central government. The other rapidly rising concern is the narcotic trade which, if not dealt with, may turn Afghanistan into another Bolivia or Colombia.

Equally important is the lack of cultivable land for farmers, a profound problem when you take into account that Afghanistan has always largely been an agricultural country, and that even before the wars destroyed lands and irrigation canals, only 5 per cent of the land was cultivable.

There [in Afghanistan ] is a tremendous need for selter. So I am focusing most of the efforts of the foundation to building shelters for refugees in northern Afghanistan and we have already begun doing so.

There [in The Kite Runner] certainly are, as is always the case with fiction, autobiographical elements woven through the narrative.

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.

There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again. I was entirely absorbed in that world as I wrote the book [The Kite Runner] and to see the final page of that manuscript whir out of the printer was a very special feeling indeed.

The images [of The Kite Runner grafic] were created in Fabio Celoni's mind. I chose to let him take the lead. Fabio and I did exchange an e-mail or two, but it was my intention to step out of the way and let his artistic instincts take over.

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.

I’ll die if you go. The Jinn will come, and I’ll have one of my fits. You’ll see, I’ll swallow my tongue and die. Don’t leave me, Mariam jo. Please stay. I’ll die if you go.

He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ''For you a thousand times over!'' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.

You don't have to donate money, it can be clothes, or books, or mediavl supplies. So there's so much that can be done [for refugees], the most difficult thing is that first step that decision to do something.

Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. "For you," he said. "I'd kill with it for you, Laila.

At the time we are focusing our efforts primarily on building shelters for refugees. Homelessness in Afghanistan is a huge problem.

I have been a fan of comic books since childhood.

You have extreme poverty and high crime and you have to admit that the governance of the Kabul regime has been poor and has been losing its popular legitimacy. You have a corrupt police force, not to mention homelessness, joblessness. The problems are huge.

After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.

If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar.

We will also be funding projects that empower women and children in Afghanistan and now and then give scholarships to Afghan students here in the Bay Area.

I have very fond memories of my childhood in Afghanistan, largely because my memories, unlike those of the current generation of Afghans, are untainted by the spectre of war, landmines, and famine.

It so happens that the major relationships in the novel [The Kite Runner] are between men, dictated not by any sort of prejudice or discomfort with female characters, but rather by the demands of the narrative.

The Kite Runner is a story of two boys and a father, and the strange love triangle that binds them.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

Zindagi migzara (life goes on)

I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But i didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lip. I ran

Fabio Celon did send me pages as he progressed, both in black and white and some color samples as well. It was really exciting to see the sketches and to see the story [The Kite Runner] shaping up visually.

I think the scale of the conflict [in Afghanistan] has dramatically changed in 2003. You're now facing a much more motivated, well-supported enemy. I don't see any quick end to this thing.

She would grab whatever she could -a look , a whisper , a moan - to salvage from perishing , to perserve. But time is most unforgivving of fires , and she couldn't , in the end , save it all .

The story line of my novel [The Kite Runner] is largely fictional. The characters were invented and the plot imagined.

I came from an educated, upper middle-class family. My mother was a Persian and history teacher at a large high school for girls. Many of the women in my extended family and in our circle of friends were professionals. In those days, women were a vital part of the economy in Kabul. They worked as lawyers, physicians, college professors, etc., which makes the tragedy of how they were treated by the Taliban that much more painful.

My own background is fairly liberal and so this notion of 'protecting women from outside intrusion' is not in my nature, nor in my upbringing.

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thous didst it of thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting.

I returned to Afghanistan because I had a deep longing to see for myself how people lived, what they thought of their government, how optimistic they were about the future of their homeland.

I believe Fabio Celoni's work vividly brings to life not only the mountains, the bazaars, the city of Kabul and its kite-dotted skies, but also the many struggles, conflicts, and emotional highs and lows of Amir's journey [from the The Kite Runner].

If I ever do get married," Tariq said, "they'll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.

Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine. Held for a moment. Flew away.

So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.

When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.

and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.

I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

You changed the subject." "From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?" "That I only have eyes for you.

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.

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.

At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.

Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not.

Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.

Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.

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.

Air grew heavy, damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks.

People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don't they? Like a badge? I'm being genuine.