KHKhaled Hosseini

151 collected words

Khaled Hosseini

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

02Undated

Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which sometimes played old Pashto songs were played, time stretched and contracted depending on his absence or presence.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

03Undated

Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which old Pashto songs were sometimes played, time stretched and contracted depending on his absence or presence.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

04Undated

She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How she could ever cope with his permanent absence?

Khaled Hosseini / quote

05Undated

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... 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.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

06Undated

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.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

07Undated

I've crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they're all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a little bit of charm-- Or a lot -- and that can fool you. But really they're all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven't been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it's a mistake to give it to them. They can't accept it. They can't accept the very thing they're needing. They end up hating you for it. And it never ends because they can't hate you enough. It never ends-- the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all. My first husband was like that.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

08Undated

James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?

Khaled Hosseini / quote

09Undated

She passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and it accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

10Undated

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But they are things that, well, you just have to see and feel. p.147

Khaled Hosseini / quote

11Undated

Nothing came out. Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

12Undated

Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know.Laila closed her eyes. Concentrated.With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion—like the phantom pain of an amputee.Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their astonishing imprudence...It would flood her, steal her breath.But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her feeling deflated, feeling noting but a vague restlessness.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

13Undated

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

14Undated

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

Khaled Hosseini / quote

15Undated

If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

16Undated

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

Khaled Hosseini / quote

17Undated

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don’t like to read

Khaled Hosseini / quote

18Undated

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.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

19Undated

What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

20Undated

I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

21Undated

Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy meant to live on, stung that she was not the reason. She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

22Undated

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

23Undated

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.

Khaled Hosseini / quote

24Undated

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.

Khaled Hosseini / quote