Khaled Hosseini

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

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

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.

Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life.

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.

Regret... when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.

She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.

I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.

All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.

I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.

At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.

I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.

you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.

I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.

They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.