And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

mirrors.

Mirrors on the models dress and mirrors on the furniture

Everything in the room was polished, free of dust. Abdullah had never in his life been so conscious of his own dirtiness.

This went on for weeks until one morning Abdullah saw him hobbling toward the hills, head hung low. No one in Shadbagh had seen him since.

I am so sad for the dog.

he would long for a swig of the magic potion the div had given Baba Ayub so he too could forget.

She was like the dust that clung to his shirt.

pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and the thrill of being seen with Masooma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream.

Quite a sentence

and that though she was only twenty she had already been “ridden all over town”

Never heard that expression

One of the men remarked that in his village they would have slit her throat by now.

Omg

There is a fading shimmer of beauty, a roughshod sexuality, behind the yellowing teeth, the fatigue pouches under the eyes.

She can tell to you every detail.

I questioned the details of dinner now understand love this author

He deleted the next two without reading.

My heart is breaking. If he could partner with his cousin he could help her. Pride is a terrible thing.

Don’t worry. You’re not in it.

Wow

He feels the blow of it, like an ax to the head.

Again wow

didn’t want her turned, against both her will and nature, into one of those diligent, sad women who are bent on a lifelong course of quiet servitude, forever in fear of showing, saying, or doing the wrong thing.

Well, children are never everything you’d hoped for, Monsieur Boustouler.

Bitch

The gown has parted slightly in the front, and Pari can see a little of the thick, dark vertical line of her mother’s old cesarian scar.

ah, built the lie here

The important thing, she said, was that they got you out.

No. There was something vicious about this move, deliberate, slashing.

Pari has known for some time that he has that capacity. She has wondered of late whether he has a taste for it as well.

A parenthesis-shaped piece of hair managed to fall on his brow, ever so gracefully—too gracefully, perhaps.

If, in fact, it was dangling there without calculation, Pari noticed that he never bothered to fix it.

She was struck, not for the first time, by both a childlike admiration for Maman and an unsettling sense that she did not really fully know her own mother.

What did not surprise was Maman’s effortless and thorough seduction of Julien.

Maman was in her element there. She never had trouble commanding men’s atten...

Maman, who was only twenty years older than herself.

Pari marveled further at how little resemblance she herself bore to Maman,

Yes, but I did it the proper way. I drank and smoked and took lovers. Who rebels with mathematics? She laughs.

I’ve given her every freedom imaginable.

Like buying her from her family and leaving her home unsupervised when she was a child

“I am Papa’s fawn! I am Papa’s fawn!” It wasn’t until much later that I saw how sinister the nickname was.

My father shot deer, Monsieur Boustouler.

Wonder if this is true, the fawn nick name

It would be the dripping faucet at the back of her mind.

Great sentence

The house stood three stories high and was painted bright pink and turquoise green.

The dog hadn’t bitten Thalia’s face; it had eaten it.

gap-toothed smile.

Alwaya

would shoot the Inca Trail.

I would brave the heat until I stood gazing up at the Sphinx and the Pyramids,

She was dressed as though she worried parts of her might come loose—like she was, literally, holding herself together.

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

“James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine.

How did men come to monopolize disease names too?”

I blink and my mother blinks back, and then she is laughing and so am I. Ev...

was this: that my mother would never leave me. This was her gift to me, the ironclad knowledge that she would never do to me what

It was like a birthmark on his face.

Is nussing. At lass, too be weez yoo!

They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.

so sad, facing dementia, knowing what is to come.