Khaled Hosseini quotes:

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.

I remember reading 'The Grapes of Wrath' in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in English where I had an 'Aha!' moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter.

I spent a lot of winters in my childhood flying kites with my brother, with my cousins, with friends in the neighborhood. It's what we did in the winter. Schools close down. There was not much to do.

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.

I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on.

My books are about ordinary people, like you, me, people on the street, people who really have an expectation of reasonable happiness in life, want their life to have a sense of security and predictability, who want to belong to something bigger than them, who want love and affection in their life, who want a good future for the children.

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.

American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.

The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

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.

I'm a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.

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.

My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters.

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.

People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections.

My memories of Kabul are vastly different than the way it is when I go there now. My memories are of the final years before everything changed. When I grew up in Kabul, it couldn't be mistaken for Beirut or Tehran, as it was still in a country that's essentially religious and conservative, but it was suprisingly progressive and liberal.

I find myself drawn to that period where children are about to leave childhood behind. When you're 12 years old, you still have one foot in childhood; the other is poised to enter a completely new stage of life. Your innocent understanding of the world moves towards something messier and more complicated, and once it does you can never go back.

I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

It's a very nice kind of quasi-fame being a writer, because you remain largely anonymous and you can have a private life, which I really cherish. I don't like to be in the public light all that much. I don't crave the whole fame thing at all.

I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.

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.

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.

I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.

I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I've never had any formal training in writing.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.

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

I am always revolted when Islamic leaders, from Afghanistan or elsewhere, deny the very existence of female oppression, avoid the issue by pointing to examples of what they view as Western mistreatment of women, or even worse, justify the oppression of women on the basis of notions derived from Sharia law.

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

With snow came the kites, once the rulers of Kabul's winter skies, now timid trespassers in territory claimed by streaking rockets and fighter jets.

Kabul fell prey to men who looked like they had tumbled out of their mothers with Kalashnikov in hand

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

Marriage can wait, education cannot.

But the fact is, I looked at my life and realized I already had what people sought in marriage.

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

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime..."

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."

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become."

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."

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

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.

There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir

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.

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. - Amir

it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.

I may not agree with all or even most of the tribal traditions, but it seems ti me that, out there, people live more authentic lives. They have a sturdiness about them. A refreshing humility. Hospitality too. And resilience. A sense of pride.

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.

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

Baba dropped the stack of food stamps on her desk. "Thank you but I don't want," Baba said. "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don't like it free money."...Baba walked out of the welfare office like a man cured of a tumor.

He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.

If I ever do get married," Tariq said, "they'll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head

A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.

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.

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.

The Taliban's acts of cultural vandalism - the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas - had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books, and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters, and sculptors.

I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.

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.

The warlords took part in atrocities during the civil war in Afghanistan. They looted, they raped, they killed. They have become incredibly empowered and entrenched. They live in mansions, they have jobs in the government, and they're incredibly powerful. In Kabul, people don't want to speak about it too publicly, because these people are essentially like Tony Soprano.

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.

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

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.

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.

All good things in life are fragile and easily lost

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

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born...

He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ''For you a thousand times over!'' he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.

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.

Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980's: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.

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.

After all, life is not a Hindi movie.

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.

Don't be afraid to tell the truth. It's better to hurt someone by truth than to make them happy by lies.

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

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.

Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful.

In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.

Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.

Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life.

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.

If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar.

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.

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.

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.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

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.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

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.

Without women taking an active role in Afghan society, rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be very difficult.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that's alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon's eye, grieve not.

Um zu schreien, musst du atmen.

He had a frozen, wide-eyed look to his face, I remember, the way some old people do, like they are perpetually startled by the monstrous surprise that is old age.

She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last.

They rarely look at Baba -- the teenagers -- and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him.

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.

you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.

Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back.She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.

Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

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

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

Kabul fell prey to men who looked like they had tumbled out of their mothers with Kalashnikov in hand...

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.

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

When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth.

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.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

I will follow you to the ends of the world.

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.

I know that in the end, God will forgive me. He will forgive your father, me, and you too. I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive me if you wish. But most important, forgive yourself.

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

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.

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.