913 Quotes by Khaled Hosseini

I didn’t know what the other guy was playing for, maybe just bragging rights. But this was my one chance to become someone who was looked at, not seen, listened to, not heard.

In Afghanistan, you don’t understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

So it would begin. The obligatory questions, the perfunctory answers. Both pretending. Unenthusiastic partners, the two of them, in this tired old dance.

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.

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.

I rescued him from the certainty of a turmoil and put him in a turmoil of uncertainty.

I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But i didn’t care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lip. I ran.

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.

By the time we’re twenty, Hasina used to say, Giti and I, we’ll have pushed out four, five kids each. But you, Laila, you’ll make us two dummies proud. You’re going to be somebody. I know one day I’ll pick up a newspaper and find your picture on the front page.