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.
But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…
There is only one sin. and that is theft… when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
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
In the end, the world always wins. That’s just the way of things.
and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.
Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
Пустинните бурени оцеляват, а пролетното цвете разцъфва и повяхва.
Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
If there’s a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.
On a high mountain I stood, And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.
It’s often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It’s what writing comes down to–worrying that things aren’t going to work out.
I see you’ve confused what you’re learning in school with actual education.
Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.
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.
Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
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.
War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.” – Baba
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
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.
Public justice is the greatest kind of show, my brother. Drama. Suspense. And best of all education en masse.
Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
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.
In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.
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.
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.
I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!
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.
it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.
That’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does.
He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn’t. It spilled out of her, came pouring out her eyes.
Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper-thin slice of intersection between those spheres.
I wondered when I had forgotten that, despite everything, he was still just a child.
She will not plant the seed in their mind, that a parent is capable of abandoning her children, of saying to them You are not enough. For Pari, the children and Eric have always been enough. They always will be.
A society has no chance of success if it’s women are uneducated.
I would have told them that he lived a life lacking in purpose or direction. Like those aimless rides I took him on. A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by. An indifferent life.
You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel.
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.
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.
Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. ‘It wasn’t meant to be’, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.
Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren’t sad?Because it was nobody’s business if I was.
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 bare to lose.
i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.
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.
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?
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.
James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?
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
Nothing came out. Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above.
And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.
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.
Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
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.
What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits.
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.
And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
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.
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.
… there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.
Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!
Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is.
Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
It would be an existence rife with difficulties… but of a pleasurable kind, difficulties they could take pride in, possess, value, as one would a family heirloom.
Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.
I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.
Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one.
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.
She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than i did the sun for shining on me.
To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things.
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.
Her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head.
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.
Exploitation to finance a beach house in Hawaii was one thing. Doing it to feed your kids was another.
Mother is fading for him, her face receding into shadows, her memory diminishing with each passing day, leaking like sand from a fist.
He knew I betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.
The reputation of a girl … is a delicate thing. Like a mynah bird in your hands. slacken your grip and away it flies.
When you kill a man, You steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, Rob his children of a father.
Mamà believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. She also believed it was always best to tell the truth, to tell it plainly, without fanfare, and the more disagreeable the truth, the sooner you had to tell it.
I finally had what I’d wantes all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.
Kabul fell prey to men who looked like they had tumbled out of their mothers with Kalashnikov in hand…
I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle.
these random unkind moment that catch you wen you least expect them.
They say, find a purpose in life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and adrift
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.
I’m a pretty uncomplicated person. I live a very simple life with my family and I enjoy very ordinary things.
In my 20s, life seemed endless. At 49, I’ve had a chance to see how dark life can be, and I am far more aware of the constraints of time than when I wrote ‘The Kite Runner.’ I realise there is only a limited number of things I can do.
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.
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.
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.
There isn’t, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.