The Kite Runner: A Novel

by Khaled Hosseini

I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

Same energy as “I'm always in that house”.

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.

Onions. I adore Hassan.

The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.

The concept sounds so foreign to people from war torn countries.

He’d referred to Assef as “Agha,” and I wondered briefly what it must be like to live with such an ingrained sense of one’s place in a hierarchy.

I wish only wish harm onto Assef. If he does not suffer, I will die wishing it.

Hassan couldn’t read a first-grade textbook but he’d read me plenty. That was a little unsettling, but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.

“To be known is to be loved” I’m actually deeply uncomfortable.

If there was a God, He’d guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I’d cut loose my pain, my longing. I’d endured too much, come too far. And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge.

He grew up rich in Afghanistan with servants but his Dad doesn’t want to read his short stories. Poor Amir, has he not endured enough? :(

I was glad I didn’t have to return his gaze. Did he know I knew? And if he knew, then what would I see if I did look in his eyes? Blame? Indignation? Or, God forbid, what I feared most: guileless devotion? That, most of all, I couldn’t bear to see.

I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.