Khaled Hosseini Quotes

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.

I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.

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.

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.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything

Some days, I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks, all the minutes, all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without you. And I can’t breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart. I get so weak. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.

the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion

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.

"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.

But then it passed, as all things do.

Gone.
Vanished.
Nothing left.
Nothing said.