Saba > Saba's Quotes

“I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
― Sir Thomas More, Utopia

“[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“What part soever you take upon you, play that as well as you can and make the best of it.”
― Sir Thomas More

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
― André Gide

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don't have to live forever. You just have to live.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting: Scholastic Book Guides

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Life is an awful, ugly place to not have a best friend.”
― Sarah Dessen, Someone Like You

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from the beauty of landscape and the cold perfect form. This is a beauty that has suffered its way through the ache of desolation until the words or music emerged to equal the hunger and desperation at its heart. It must also be said that not all woundedness succeeds in finding its way through to beauty of form. Most woundedness remains hidden, lost inside forgotten silence. Indeed, in every life there is some wound that continues to weep secretly, even after years of attempted healing. Where woundedness can be refined into beauty a wonderful transfiguration takes place.”
― John O'Donohue

“Sometimes you've got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.”
― Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

“Don’t ever put your happiness in someone else’s hands. They’ll drop it. They’ll drop it every time.”
― Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

“I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn’t dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it’s harder to burn memories when you’ve still got life left. When you’re alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.”
― Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

“Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Poor are those who have eyes but cannot see... ☥”
― Luis Marques, Kemet - The Year of Revelation

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed