Quotes by Afghan Authors - Page 4

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.
Khaled Hosseini
With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion--like the phantom pain of an amputee.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
... I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariam jo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that I let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so-called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps that is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariam jo. Forgive me, forgive me. Forgive me...
Khaled Hosseini
Come. There is a way to be good again...
Khaled Hosseini
Children always forgive their mothers. That's the way God's designed them. He gives them two arms, two legs, and a heart that will cry 'mother' until the day it stops beating.
Nadia Hashimi
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.
Khaled Hosseini
I am glad that I can tell the truth, for lies are a form of theft; the liar steals from another person's trust. There are liars all over the world who have grown rich on the trust they have stolen.
Najaf Mazari
On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.
Tahir Shah
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.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
He believes that people have destroyed religion and religion has destroyed people. He says he believes in God, but he doesn't believe in people.
Nadia Hashimi
Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.
Tahir Shah
I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.
Khaled Hosseini
In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.
Tahir Shah
Osman and Prideep had been in my employment for some weeks. Every Friday I would take the to lunch. It was the high point of their calender. During the meal I would harangue them as a reminder of what they had been hired for: but my orations never seemed to increase their output. I realised later that, in the East, a commitment to produce does not automatically accompany employment.
Tahir Shah
A society has no chance of success if it's women are uneducated.
Khaled Hosseini
When Aziza first spotted Mariam in the morning, her eyes always sprang open, and she began mewling and squirming in her mother's grip. She thrust her arms toward Mariam, demanding to be held, her tiny hands opening and closing urgently, on her face a look of both adoration and quivering anxiety..."Why have you pinned your little heart to an old, ugly hag like me?" Mariam would murmur into Aziza's hair... "What have I got to give you?"But Aziza only muttered contentedly and dug her face in deeper. And when she did that, Mariam swooned. Her eyes watered. Her heart took flight. And she marveled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
Children are touched by heaven—their every breath, every laugh, every touch a sip of water to the desert wanderer. I could not have known this as a child, but I know it as a mother, a truth I learned as my own heart grew, bent, danced, and broke for each of my children
Nadia Hashimi
I wondered when I had forgotten that, despite everything, he was still just a child.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does.
Khaled Hosseini
it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
We all can't be Rich, but we can be civilized human beings to each other.
Saleem Durrani
I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!
Khaled Hosseini
Running an expedition can bring out the worst in a man. It can make you a power-crazed monster.
Tahir Shah
Experience has taught me the power of trophies. You may have every knick-knack and useless contraption ever devised, but while they weigh you down, a simple trophy can go a long, long way.
Tahir Shah
Do as you must -- you are not a child. But understand that there are many people willing to make your life more difficult. It is up to you to find a way to make things easier for yourself.
Nadia Hashimi
To be around family is to feel the possibility of growing roots again.
Nadia Hashimi
Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us al, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.
Tahir Shah
Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent.
Tahir Shah
We were pressed against each other, a husband and wife bound together not by marriage, but by the harmony of our hearts. Death could not undo us, I'd learned. My hamsar was with me still. He would watch over us, my beloved husband, as we made our way into tomorrow.
Nadia Hashimi
I welcome you to my home as my son, as the husband of my daughter who is the noor of my eye. Your pain will be our pain, your joy our joy. I hope that you will come to see your Khala and Jamila and me as a second set of parents, and I pray for your and our lovely Soraya jan's happiness. you both have our blessings.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one's elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades.
Tahir Shah
A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.
Tahir Shah
She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up into the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke silently on the people below- As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us
Khaled Hosseini
Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.
Khaled Hosseini
For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news -- as you learn how much more of it's been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home
Tahir Shah
[T]hrough bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.
Tahir Shah
For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.
Tahir Shah
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.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
Tahir Shah
When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.
Tahir Shah
Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones.
Tahir Shah
An entire lifetime can change in one afternoon. The rest of the world can continue on, unaware of a quiet, solitary cataclysm occurring a few feet away.
Nadia Hashimi
In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.
Khaled Hosseini
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.
Khaled Hosseini
Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
Khaled Hosseini
Public justice is the greatest kind of show, my brother. Drama. Suspense. And best of all education en masse.
Khaled Hosseini
This “freedom” put a proud people in chainsAnd turned free men into slaves“Independence” made us weakAnd slaughtered usIn the name of kindnessThis is democracy by the whipAnd the fear of chainsWith a whirlwind at its core
Abdul Salam Zaeef
What he wanted to say was that two thousand years of peace could be undone in a month of war.
Nadia Hashimi
But war had a taming effect
Nadia Hashimi
I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariamjo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that l let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariamjo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariamjo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.
Khaled Hosseini