"...but better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"For you, a thousand times over"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime..."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors."
— Khaled Hosseini

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

"There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"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 (The Kite Runner)

"And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"There is a way to be good again..."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated..."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Marriage can wait, education cannot."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

""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 to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.""
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"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

"'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.'"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

""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.'"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

""War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"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."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"For you, a thousand times over

Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night."
— Khaled Hosseini

"Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"You changed the subject."
"From what?"
"The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy."
"You know."
"Know what?"
"That I only have eyes for you."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime..."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. 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 the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"[It is]better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"I will follow you to the ends of the world."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"Miriam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. 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. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"...there is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him... there is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He will forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need. I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

""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."
(The Kite Runner) "
— Khaled Hosseini

"Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"For you, anything."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads)."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"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"
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

""there is a way to be good again"-the kite runner
i really like this quote because it makes it seem that no matter what you do you always have the option of doing good."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"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."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"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."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"Except that wasn't all. The real fun began when a kite was cut. That was where the kite runners came in, those kids who chased the windblown kite drifting through the neighborhoods until it came spiraling down in a field, dropping in someone's yard, on a tree or a rooftop. The chase got pretty fierce; hordes of kite runners swarmed the streets, shoved past each other like those people from Spain I'd read about once, the ones who ran from the bulls. One year a neighborhood kid climbed a pine tree for a kite. A branch snapped under his weight and he fell thirty feet. Broke his back and never walked again. But he fell with the kite still in his hands. And when a kite runner has his hands on a kite, no one could take it from him. That wasn't a rule. That was a custom."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"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. "
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

""she is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.""
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)