A Quote by Khaled Hosseini
Family is so central to Afghan life that all Afghan stories are family stories. Family is something I simply can't resist because all the great themes of human life - duty, grief, sacrifice, love, envy - you find all those things within families.
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The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.
The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.
What I do with everything is take things out of real life. You encounter all sorts of stories. It's a lot of your friends and family, sometimes there's quite sad episodes in their life and everything. So just little things I've picked up along the years always find a way into all of my stories.
I grew up in a family where the love of stories is very strong. And there's also a love of performance. I think one reason stories were so important in my family was that we moved around a lot.
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.
Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.
The Western media has depicted the Afghan woman as a helpless, weak individual. I have said it before, and I shall repeat it: The Afghan woman is strong. The Afghan woman is resourceful. The Afghan woman is resilient.
I don't think I've ever signed onto anything as quickly as I did The Hollars, because I come from a really loving, well-connected family, where we see each other all the time. And when I was done with this script, I was like, "Oh my god, that's my family!" This is obviously a very dysfunctional family, but there was something about it that was sort of universal. And I think that in this day and age in today's world - there's a lot of drama out there. It's nice to tell stories about things as simple and powerful as family.
My great strength, which I very much believe in, is family. For me, family doesn't simply mean components of DNA. I mean family in the sense of siblings. My mom and my sisters are the energy and inspiration in my life.
It is within the family that children learn the values that will guide them for the rest of their lives. It is within the family that they form their earliest relationships, learn to communicate with others and interact with the world around them. It is within the family that the notion of human rights becomes a reality lived on a daily basis. If tolerance, respect and equity permeate family life, they will translate into values that shape societies, nations and the world.
I think it's human nature that if we don't have our own family, we will create a family, because it's human nature, and it's that element of trust and dependency and love and all of those sort of things.
If you search for poverty, you'll find it, often in the family. Why? Because the family makes this great investment, from which we all benefit, but for which no-one helps. We have to point the spotlight on the family, and make political choices that sustain the family.
I'm always drawn toward family drama, and dysfunctional family stories. It speaks to me, in a really profound way, and I think there's so much to explore within it.
In Afghan culture, you don't date - you marry. Even talking to boys before marriage brings great shame to your family.
Life is painful sometimes. It touches everyone, so you may as well try to look for other answers and find peace. So, it is difficult to write those types of things because nobody wants to tell sad stories. I think that I'll always tell stories about human hope. I would love to be able to tell somebody, "It's okay. It's all right. Be a good person." That's what my job is, in life.
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