In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.
Interpretation
The parent-child relationship profoundly shapes an individual's identity and perception of self, marked by a mix of emotions.
Khaled Hosseini emphasizes the significant impact of parents on their children's lives, illustrating how the complexities of the parent-child bond define one's identity and self-perception. This relationship is often fraught with conflicting emotions such as love and anger, showcasing the multifaceted nature of familial ties and their influence on personal development.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of parenting in child development.
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.
There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break. - Amir
I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.
And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
My mother didn't want me to be in fashion. She was in the fashion business, so was my brother, and she thought it was too crazy for me. She wanted me to be married with children, to be independent, yes, but not to have a crazy life.
You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won't wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she'll hear you.
Motherhood is priced Of God, at price no man may dare To lessen or misunderstand.
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.
Mothers support certain illusions about their children, and one of my illusions was that I liked who I was, because she did. When she passed away, so did that idea.
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