100 Quotes by Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-American novelist, has masterfully woven the tapestry of human emotions and experiences through his evocative storytelling. His debut novel, "The Kite Runner," took readers on a poignant journey through friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against the backdrop of Afghanistan's tumultuous history. Hosseini's writing possesses a unique ability to connect people across cultures and borders, fostering empathy for characters who grapple with universal themes of love, loss, and the pursuit of identity. His subsequent works, such as "A Thousand Splendid Suns" and "And the Mountains Echoed," further solidified his reputation for crafting intricate narratives that resonate on a deeply emotional level. Beyond his literary contributions, Hosseini's advocacy for refugees and his efforts to raise awareness about the plight of Afghan people reflect his commitment to addressing real-world issues through the power of storytelling.
Khaled Hosseini Quotes
You can not stop you from being who you are. (Meaning)
People say that eyes are windows to the soul. (Meaning)
But then it passed, as all things do. (Meaning)
All good things in life are fragile and easily lost (Meaning)
There is a way to be good again. (Meaning)
Some stories don't need telling (Meaning)
True redemption is...when guilt leads to good. (Meaning)
Marriage can wait, education cannot. (Meaning)
I think he loved us equally, but differently. (Meaning)
I will follow you to the ends of the world. (Meaning)
Sad stories make good books (Meaning)
Cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour. (Meaning)
There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood. (Meaning)
I guess some stories do not need telling. (Meaning)
Life is a train, get on board. (Meaning)
You say their stories, it is gift they give you. (Meaning)
Air grew heavy, damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks. (Meaning)
Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. (Meaning)
Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun. (Meaning)
It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names. (Meaning)
Zindagi migzara: Life goes on (Meaning)
The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.
Hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.
She said, 'I'm so afraid.' And I said, 'why?,' and she said, 'Because I'm so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.' I asked her why and she said, 'They only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
J’aurais dû être plus gentille—I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.
And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
No matter where we're born, which countries we're raised in, what cultures we come from, there are some universal experiences we all have as children. We all kind of start the same. We want the love of our parents, companionship, friends, we want to have fun, to play, and we're all hurt the first time we learn that the world is far from perfect place - it's the start of a series of epiphanies and realizations that is what growing up is all about.
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.
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.
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.
I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.
In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.
it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.
For you, a thousand times over
Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything
Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
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.
True redemption is...when guilt leads to good.
Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.
A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated.
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.
Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.
Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.
There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
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.
People say that eyes are windows to the soul.
Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.
War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
Marriage can wait, education cannot.
And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.
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.
Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but 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. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.
You can not stop you from being who you are.
My family left Afghanistan in 1976, well before the Communist coup and the Soviet invasion. We certainly thought we would be going back. But when we saw those Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan, the prospect for return looked very dim. Few of us, I have to say, envisioned that nearly a quarter century of bloodletting would follow.
Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.
I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.
She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.
Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
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.
yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism
I've read that if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.
What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.
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.
It's tremendous what can happen when suddenly you make an emotional connection.
Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. 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 the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.
Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.
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.
A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.
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.
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.
I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.
She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. 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 bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.
I 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
At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.
I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.
A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.
I finally had what I'd wantes all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
But then it passed, as all things do.
The Chinese say it's better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.
There is a way to be good again.
In early 1999, I was watching TV, when I came across a story on Afghanistan. It was a story about the Taliban and the restrictions they were imposing on the Afghan people, most notably women. At some point in the story, there was a casual reference to them having banned the game of kite fighting. This detail struck a personal chord with me, as I had grown up in Kabul flying kite with my friends.
Her impulse, her need, to be the corrector of injustices, warden of the downtrodden flock. And
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.
That's how children deal with terror, they fall asleep.
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.
For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
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.
By then The Kite Runner had become quite successful and I found myself in a position that I had always dreamed of my whole life, which was to write for a living.
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.
And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.
I will follow you to the ends of the world.
I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.
Sad stories make good books
Mostly, though, I dream of good things...I dream that flowers will bloom in the streets again and music will play in the...houses and kites will fly in the skies.
The story of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, however, is a very important one, and fertile ground for fiction.
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.
All good things in life are fragile and easily lost
Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.
Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.
Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
Dr. Bashiri, if I ever want to put a curse in someone, I say, 'May God give you a restaurant.
cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.
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.
It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.
What was I supposed to be, growing in your womb -- assuming it was even in our womb that I was conceived? A seed of hope? A ticket purchased to ferry you from the dark? A patch for that hole you carried in your heart? If so, then I wasn't enough. I wasn't nearly enough. I was no balm to your pain, only another dead end, another burden, and you must have seen that early on. You must have realized it. But what could you do? You couldn't go down to the pawnshop and sell me.
I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.
I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.
She wished she could visit Mariam's grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn't matter. Mariam is never very far.... Mariam is in her own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
After all, life is not a Hindi movie.
Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975 —and all that followed— was already laid in those first words.
Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you're breaithing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. Cut you have to breathe to scream. Panic.
The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.
Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn't bypass you, Laila.
Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.
Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought into making you.
She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.
In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.
Some stories don't need telling
He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.
I'm gladly doing my own thing for the time being.
All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.
I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home
Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.
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.
No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.
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." Laila swooned inside. She tried to read his face but was met by a look that was indecipherable: the cheerful, cretinous grin at odds with the narrow, half desperate look in his eyes. A clever look, calculated to fall precisely at the midpoint between mockery and sincerity
Regret... when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.
I think he loved us equally, but differently.
You've always been a tourist here. You just didn't know it.
You don't order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them 'sister' the next.
All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.
She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.
In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.
― Khaled Hosseini Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
