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d219f8a
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Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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0a221b5
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J'aurais du etre plus gentille--I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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75b5800
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You've always been a tourist here. You just didn't know it.
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runner
tourist
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Khaled Hosseini |
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4de7f4f
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All good things in life are fragile and easily lost
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Khaled Hosseini |
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0c8bd83
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I'm so afraid. Because I'm so profoundly happy. Happiness like this is frightening...They only let you this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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dfa072a
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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.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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ec27338
|
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.
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life
love
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Khaled Hosseini |
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cd0084d
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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.
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love
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Khaled Hosseini |
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fd8695f
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I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn't.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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4e6361a
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A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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8351198
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Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
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friendship
gender-differences
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Khaled Hosseini |
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ebe1d99
|
Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end...crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).
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Khaled Hosseini |
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afe7195
|
I know you're still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.
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war
marriage
education
young-women
bright
country
smart
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Khaled Hosseini |
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9eaf152
|
Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we..
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Khaled Hosseini |
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87bfb8e
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But the game involves only male names. Because, if it's a girl, Laila has already named her
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Khaled Hosseini |
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c32c311
|
You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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7ef5bdc
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When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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f0f6b3b
|
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last..
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rape
rape-survivor
raped
trauma
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Khaled Hosseini |
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83a55ac
|
Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that's all she can do. That and hope.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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01a6827
|
yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism
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Khaled Hosseini |
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84ddbd6
|
The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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83cc6b3
|
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.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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e525c43
|
They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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ac9d5f5
|
And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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5675e3d
|
Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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127f21e
|
Sad stories make good books
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inspirational
|
Khaled Hosseini |
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c30966d
|
For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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e99c7c2
|
Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. "For you," he said. "I'd kill with it for you, Laila."
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Khaled Hosseini |
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de2a7a2
|
Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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f13674d
|
Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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67f653b
|
Life is a train, get on board.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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710c96c
|
There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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6cd0de2
|
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."
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Khaled Hosseini |
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d9953a1
|
But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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bb45385
|
The finger cut, to save the hand.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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a54f8ff
|
It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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3a2ef15
|
the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion
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Khaled Hosseini |
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1de8d1c
|
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..
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love
|
Khaled Hosseini |
|
9ecda9b
|
And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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3989bb1
|
She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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8cf2068
|
He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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177bd11
|
I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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c8b6d25
|
That's how children deal with terror, they fall asleep.
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Khaled Hosseini |
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3f70bb9
|
And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.
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Khaled Hosseini |