The voices / 151 fragments

Khaled Hosseini

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01Undated

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

02Undated

Marriage can wait, education cannot.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

03Undated

‎I know you're still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

04Undated

I see you've confused what you're learning in school with actual education.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

05Undated

Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

06Undated

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.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

07Undated

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 in making you.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

08Undated

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

09Undated

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.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

10Undated

I'll put it on my table where I keep my drawings," Hassan said.His saying that made me kind of sad. Sad for who Hassan was, where he lived. For how he'd accepted the fact that he'd grow old in that mud shack in the yard, the way his father had.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

11Undated

For you, a thousand times over!

Khaled Hosseini / quote

12Undated

War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba

Khaled Hosseini / quote

13Undated

That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the tool-shed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows.At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river's sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself "Titanic Beggar.""Titanic City" was born.It's the song, they said.No, the sea. The luxury. The ship.It's the sex, they whispered.Leo, said Aziza sheepishly. It's all about Leo."Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

14Undated

He scarcely knew who was battling whom, who was winning, who was losing, as though he hoped that by doggedly ignoring the war it would return the favor

Khaled Hosseini / quote

15Undated

Ask him where his shame is." They spoke. "He says this is war. There is no shame in war." "Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

16Undated

I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. Imiss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariamjo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you adaughter to me, that l let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariamjo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for yourforgiveness. So forgive me, Mariamjo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

17Undated

Public justice is the greatest kind of show, my brother. Drama. Suspense. And best of all education en masse.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

18Undated

Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

19Undated

Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

20Undated

In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

21Undated

And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

22Undated

Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

23Undated

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 into the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke silently on the people below- As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us

Khaled Hosseini / quote

24Undated

I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it did not care a whit about the hopes and reams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.

Khaled Hosseini / quote