Khaled Hosseini

“I will follow you to the ends of the world.”

“One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.”

“and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.”

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

“It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting. - Amir”

“There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir”

“War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba”

“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir”

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”

“Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”

“A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated...”

“A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.”

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”

“Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”

“And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.”

“You changed the subject.""From what?""The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy.""You know.""Know what?""That I only have eyes for you.”

“There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.”

“Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

“Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.”

“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.”

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

“Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).”

“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.”

“All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.”

“Men are easy,' he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. 'A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought into making you.”

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

“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.”

“sesuatu yang terjadi dalam beberapa hari, kadang-kadang bahkan dalam sehari, bisa mengubah keseluruhan jalan hidup seseorang.”

“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.”

“There is a way to be good again...”

“I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.”

“For you, a thousand times over”

“Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”