The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?”

Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.

blameless blue.

“For you a thousand times over!”

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.

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir,” he said.

Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, never forget that.”

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 lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: “Avoid them like the plague.” Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

It was the most tired laughter I’d ever heard.

Zendagi migzara, we say, life goes on.

is a heartbreaking sound, Amir jan, the wailing of a mother.

I guess some stories do not need telling.

it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

time can be a greedy thing—sometimes it steals all the details for itself.

Hassan had loved me once, loved me in a way that no one ever had or ever would again.

set my hands on the rusty bars, remembering how I’d run through these same gates thousands of times as a child, for things that mattered not at all now and yet had seemed so important then.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

“Would you like to come live in America with me and my wife?” He didn’t answer. He sobbed into my shirt and I let him.

Gives me goosebumps.

That’s how children deal with terror. They fall asleep.

I see Him here, in the eyes of the people in this corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him, not the white masjid with its bright diamond lights and towering minarets.

If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn’t know what to say. Does anybody’s?

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.

Quiet is peace. Tranquillity. Quiet is turning down the VOLUME knob on life. Silence is pushing the OFF button. Shutting it down. All of it.

He walked like he was afraid to leave behind footprints. He moved as if not to stir the air around him.