Quotes by Afghan Authors - Page 2

With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.
Tahir Shah
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
An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems.
Tahir Shah
You've turned out good.You've made me proud, Markos.I am fifty-five years old. I have waited all my life to hear those words. Is it too late now for this? For us? Have we squandered too much for too long? Part of me thinks it is better to go on as we have, to act as though we don't know how ill suited we have been for each other. Less painful that way. Perhaps better than this belated offering. This fragile, trembling little glimpse of how it could have been between us. All it will beget is regret, I tell myself, and what good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
Khaled Hosseini
Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope.
Nadia Hashimi
The pain we feel in separation is the price we pay for love.
Hatef Mokhtar
Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one. 
Khaled Hosseini
The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.
Tahir Shah
Venture to a remote corner of a faraway land and, from the moment you get there, every person and every thing becomes an obstacle, designed to entrap you, to stop you proceeding on your way.
Tahir Shah
Being not perfect is not about making mistakes and saying I'm sorry, but! its about learning from it and then being perfect for not making the same mistake again.
Saleem Durrani
We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.
Tamim Ansary
I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover.
Tamim Ansary
The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.
Tahir Shah
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.
Khaled Hosseini
But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested.
Tahir Shah
Respect was one thing. Survival was another. It was important that I kept my priorities in the right order.
Tahir Shah
Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
Khaled Hosseini
Stories close the gap and reconcile between what we want life to be and how it actually is.
Khaled Hosseini
Stories are a communal currency of humanity.
Tahir Shah
My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves.
Tahir Shah
He thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy that he had been given. To want more, to wish for yet more, he knew, would be petty. He sighed happily, and listened to the wind sweeping down from the mountains, to the chirping of night birds.
Khaled Hosseini
The peacock's plumage is its enemy: O many the king who hath been slain by his magnificence!
Maulana Jalaluddin Mohammad Balkhi
Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!
Khaled Hosseini
... there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
war. Or, rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain. The names changed, as did the faces, and I spit on them equally for all the petty feuds, the snipers, the land mines, bombing raids, the rockets, the looting and raping and killing.
Khaled Hosseini
In India everything has a use and a value.
Tahir Shah
The only thing they valued higher than ammunition were Man United footballs.
Tahir Shah
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 of a husband, you rob his children of a father. When you lie you steal someone's right to truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no more wretched act than stealing. A man who takes what is not his to take, be it life or a loaf of naan, I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him.
Khaled Hosseini
We all cross a hundred peaks to get even this far. And there will be more before we each make it to whatever God has fated for us.
Nadia Hashimi
Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?
Tahir Shah
The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.
Tahir Shah
A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.
Tahir Shah
Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.
Tahir Shah
Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.
Tahir Shah
There's nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping.
Tahir Shah
As far as Samson was concerned I was just another foreigner in pursuit of a lunatic quest.
Tahir Shah
A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you.
Tahir Shah
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
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
It's time to undo Rahim.
Nadia Hashimi
The ants are bad" The Bear"the ants?"Tahir"Do not be fooled. They look very small, so harm you don't think of then at all. Then years. Then one day you wake up, and your home has fallen down." Osman.
Tahir Shah
And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
Khaled Hosseini
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
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
What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits.
Khaled Hosseini
My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.
Tahir Shah
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
Tahir Shah
At the dealership, I pulled out the sieve and toyed with it threateningly. When the salesman was ready for me, I held it up, told him I was not a tourist and demanded a large discount.
Tahir Shah
Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them.
Tahir Shah
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
Back at the guest house I tried to acclimatise. A travel-worn adventurer had once told me that leaning with one's head dangling over the end of a bed was the best way to achieve this. It was while I was in this position, the blood rushing to my temples, that the door swung open.
Tahir Shah
As the head of an expedition, you can't pussyfoot around being polite to everyone. You have to show your teeth once in a while; a little growling goes a long way.
Tahir Shah
Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.
Tahir Shah
Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it.
Tahir Shah
There are two ways to find a lost city. The first is to rely on luck alone, the second is to control all the information.
Tahir Shah
Exploration is a dirty game.
Tahir Shah
The situation was different in the jungle. Every inch of ground had to be earned, and was done so through much exertion with the blade.
Tahir Shah