Quote collection
356 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The [George W.] Bush administration tripled its aid package to Afghanistan. [Hamid] Karzai finally (and courageously) announced that warlords will be forbidden from holding office in the future government. And finally, NATO agreed to expand the peacekeeping forces to troubled areas outside of Kabul."
"Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her."
"You’re not going to cry, are you? - I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years."
"[Barack Obama] is sending more troops [to Afghanistan], but they have also realized that we are not going to win that war through guns and tanks. We have to engage the neighbors, and it is good that there is a non-military strategy in addition to a military strategy. It is, at least, encouraging. Whether it will work or not, the jury is still put."
"I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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"
"[Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns] is not just unique to books, but films and music."
"He had the blue kite in his hands; that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips."
"Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975 —and all that followed— was already laid in those first words."
"After all, life is not a Hindi movie."
"It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good."
"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."
"Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you're breaithing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. Cut you have to breathe to scream. Panic."
"Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn't bypass you, Laila."
"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."
"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."
"Zindagi migzara (life goes on)"