And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

“For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.”

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart.

They say, Find a purpose in your 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.

I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.

The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.

I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that. My patients knew this. They saw that much of what they were, would be, or could be hinged on the symmetry of their bone structure, the space between their eyes, their chin length, the tip projection of their nose, whether they had an ideal nasofrontal angle or not. Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

“It’s a funny thing, Markos, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.”

There is no accounting for how the mind works. This moment, for instance. Of the thousands and thousands of moments my mother and I shared together through all the years, this is the one that shines the brightest, the one that vibrates with the loudest hum at the back of my mind: my mother looking up at me over her shoulder, her face upside down, all those dazzling points of light shimmering on her skin, her asking did I know how good and strong God had made me.

“But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.”