If there is one writer in the post-modern era, who has this brilliant knack of weeding out the deepest thoughts and desires of the mind, who through his exceptional writing can demystify the innermost feelings of human heart and has been successful in leading many of his readers back to faith at the face of excruciating adversity, he is Khaled Hosseini.
With almost all of his story plots partially set in the war ravaged Afghanistan with an Afghan protagonist, his ability to explain the subtlest of feelings- the fear in happiness, the suffocation in regret, the pain in lying, the diversity in love, the emotional necessities in a war – becomes much more prominent.
Here are 10 quotes from Hosseini, which will pull the strings of heart quite surrealistically-
“She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you.”
“You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is… God help him.”
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
“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”
“It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.”
“War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.” – Baba
“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.”
“The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”
“I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away.”
“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.”
