And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

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

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

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

Entering my childhood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel that I’d started, then abandoned, long ago.

“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.”