Quotes by Afghan Authors - Page 2

As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code.
Tahir Shah
Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
Khaled Hosseini
Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.
Khaled Hosseini
I've crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they're all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a little bit of charm-- Or a lot -- and that can fool you. But really they're all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven't been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it's a mistake to give it to them. They can't accept it. They can't accept the very thing they're needing. They end up hating you for it. And it never ends because they can't hate you enough. It never ends-- the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all. My first husband was like that.
Khaled Hosseini
Previous experience had taught me that any expedition marches on its stomach.
Tahir Shah
With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion--like the phantom pain of an amputee.
Khaled Hosseini
Who rebels with mathematics?
Khaled Hosseini
Osman and Prideep had been in my employment for some weeks. Every Friday I would take the to lunch. It was the high point of their calender. During the meal I would harangue them as a reminder of what they had been hired for: but my orations never seemed to increase their output. I realised later that, in the East, a commitment to produce does not automatically accompany employment.
Tahir Shah
The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.
Tahir Shah
I welcome you to my home as my son, as the husband of my daughter who is the noor of my eye. Your pain will be our pain, your joy our joy. I hope that you will come to see your Khala and Jamila and me as a second set of parents, and I pray for your and our lovely Soraya jan's happiness. you both have our blessings.
Khaled Hosseini
Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!
Khaled Hosseini
In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover.
Tamim Ansary
A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bare to lose.
Khaled Hosseini
Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, she had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which sometimes played old Pashto songs were played, time stretched and contracted depending on his absence or presence.
Khaled Hosseini
He scarcely knew who was battling whom, who was winning, who was losing, as though he hoped that by doggedly ignoring the war it would return the favor
Khaled Hosseini
I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land... it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistanhumming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me either. I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San FranciscoChronicle. Somewhere over those mountains in the west slept the city where my harelipped brother and I had run kites. Somewhere over there, the blindfolded man from my dream had died a needless death. Once, over those mountains, I had made a choice. And now, a quarter of a century later, that choice had landed me right back on this soil.
Khaled Hosseini
Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope.
Nadia Hashimi
She wished she could visit Mariam's grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn't matter. Mariam is never very far.... Mariam is in her own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
Khaled Hosseini
When you kill a man, You steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, Rob his children of a father.
Khaled Hosseini
Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
Khaled Hosseini
With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.
Tahir Shah
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.
Tahir Shah
Being not perfect is not about making mistakes and saying I'm sorry, but! its about learning from it and then being perfect for not making the same mistake again.
Saleem Durrani
The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.
Tahir Shah
We all cross a hundred peaks to get even this far. And there will be more before we each make it to whatever God has fated for us.
Nadia Hashimi
There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
Khaled Hosseini
When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.
Tahir Shah
about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.
Khaled Hosseini
As the man was bundled into an armoured police van, he turned and shouted: ‘Don’t waste your life following others! Be individual! Live your dreams!’I stood there thinking. He was right. Ours is a society of followers, trapped by an island mentality.
Tahir Shah
A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.
Khaled Hosseini
In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.
Khaled Hosseini
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Khaled Hosseini
Ahesta boro, Mah-e-man, ahesta boro.
Khaled Hosseini
An entire lifetime can change in one afternoon. The rest of the world can continue on, unaware of a quiet, solitary cataclysm occurring a few feet away.
Nadia Hashimi
An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems.
Tahir Shah
What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits.
Khaled Hosseini
Back at the guest house I tried to acclimatise. A travel-worn adventurer had once told me that leaning with one's head dangling over the end of a bed was the best way to achieve this. It was while I was in this position, the blood rushing to my temples, that the door swung open.
Tahir Shah
... I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariam jo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that I let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so-called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps that is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariam jo. Forgive me, forgive me. Forgive me...
Khaled Hosseini
Ask him where his shame is." They spoke. "He says this is war. There is no shame in war." "Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
Khaled Hosseini
You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But they are things that, well, you just have to see and feel. p.147
Khaled Hosseini
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
As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.
Tahir Shah
That’s what being a mother is, isn’t it? Waiting for a rounded belly to tighten in readiness; listening for the sound of hunger in the moonlit hours; hearing an eager voice call even in the camouflage of traffic, loud music, and whirring machines. It’s looking at every door, every phone, and every approaching silhouette and feeling that slight lift, that tickle of opportunity to be again—mother.
Nadia Hashimi
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.
Khaled Hosseini
The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.
Tahir Shah
Come. There is a way to be good again...
Khaled Hosseini
Every promise we kept, every squeeze of the hand, every secretive smile we exchanged, every crying child we comforted- every one of those moments narrowed the distance between us.
Nadia Hashimi
You've turned out good.You've made me proud, Markos.I am fifty-five years old. I have waited all my life to hear those words. Is it too late now for this? For us? Have we squandered too much for too long? Part of me thinks it is better to go on as we have, to act as though we don't know how ill suited we have been for each other. Less painful that way. Perhaps better than this belated offering. This fragile, trembling little glimpse of how it could have been between us. All it will beget is regret, I tell myself, and what good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
Khaled Hosseini
Exploitation to finance a beach house in Hawaii was one thing. Doing it to feed your kids was another.
Khaled Hosseini
As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.
Tahir Shah
A society has no chance of success if it's women are uneducated.
Khaled Hosseini
For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.
Tahir Shah
Children always forgive their mothers. That's the way God's designed them. He gives them two arms, two legs, and a heart that will cry 'mother' until the day it stops beating.
Nadia Hashimi
Her eyes traced the sleek shape of the table's legs, the sinuous curves of its corners, the gleam of its reflective, dark brown surface. She noticed that every time she breathed out, the surface fogged, and she disappeared from her father's table.
Khaled Hosseini
these random unkind moment that catch you wen you least expect them.
Khaled Hosseini
We were pressed against each other, a husband and wife bound together not by marriage, but by the harmony of our hearts. Death could not undo us, I'd learned. My hamsar was with me still. He would watch over us, my beloved husband, as we made our way into tomorrow.
Nadia Hashimi
On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.
Tahir Shah
Nothing came out. Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above.
Khaled Hosseini
If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.
Tahir Shah
To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things.
Khaled Hosseini