d8bae57
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Maman had been a gifted writer. Pari has read every word Maman had written in French and every poem she had translated from Farsi as well. The power and beauty of her writing was undeniable. But if the account Maman had given of her life in the interview was a lie, then where did the images of her work come from? Where was the wellspring for words that were honest and lovely and brutal and sad? Was she merely a gifted trickster? A magician,..
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Khaled Hosseini |
46b4bbc
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khlf kl mtHn wkl 'lm nlqh , fn llh Hkm@ fy dhlk
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Khaled Hosseini |
12dc44f
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Thinking of the anguish of his final days and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you're going to sleep, the ones you've already forgotten by the time you wake up.
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Khaled Hosseini |
7b80a5f
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Biliyorsun." "Neyi biliyorum?" "Gozlerimin sadece seni gordugunu."
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gözler
seni
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Khaled Hosseini |
4e9d846
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You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel.
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life
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Khaled Hosseini |
2acc392
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The moment is brief, barely enough for a flutter of the pulse but long enough for her illusory self to catch up with the reality of the woman gazing back from the shopwindow. It is a little devastating. This is what ageing is, she thinks as she follows Isabelle into the store, these random unkind moments that catch you when you least expect them.
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Khaled Hosseini |
a4100ee
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I suspect the truth is we are waiting, all of us, against unsurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
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Khaled Hosseini |
2f436b0
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Even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls
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poetry
rumi-poetry
afghans
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Khaled Hosseini |
d985f36
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Take two Afghans who've never met, put them in a room for ten minutes, and they'll figure out how they're related.
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Khaled Hosseini |
9eb1c9c
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It feels as though there is a gaping hole in the middle of everything. The decades of my mother's life here with Thalia, they are dark, vast spaces to me. I have been absent. Absent for all the meals Thalia and Mama have shared at this table, the laughs, the quarrels, the stretches of boredom, the illnesses, the long string of simple rituals that make up a lifetime. Entering my child-hood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end ..
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Khaled Hosseini |
161d82e
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Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.
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Khaled Hosseini |
e6f7433
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A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed, it won't stretch to make room for you.
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Khaled Hosseini |
50c2deb
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Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one.
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sacrifice
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khaled hosseini |
a16f9ea
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I know. I know. But he's always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he's lost in some dream." "And?" "I wasn't like that." Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Khan laughed. "Children aren't colouring books. You don't get to fill them with your favourite colours." --
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Khaled Hosseini |
5b6cf55
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kl ndf@ thlj hy tnhyd@ thqyl@ mn mr'@ mHzwn@ fy mkn m fy l`lm. kl tlk ltnhydt lty tnsq btjh lsm ttjm` fy lGywm thm ttsqT bhdw `l~ shkl qT` SGyr@ `l~ lns. nh tdhkyr blns llwty y`nyn mthln, kyf ntHml bSmt kl ldhy yq` `l~ khln.
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Khaled Hosseini |
45dd8cd
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She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How shr could ever cope with his permanent absence?
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Khaled Hosseini |
afa2284
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She hears the words childhood leukemia, or maybe he says lymphoma, and what's the difference anyway?....She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the worl..
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Khaled Hosseini |
74c9118
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Their fights didn't so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered.
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Khaled Hosseini |
2368a15
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Bareh tu hazar dafa!
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Khaled Hosseini |
f7a6df4
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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.
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Khaled Hosseini |
6ae4478
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Mama believed in loyalty above all, even at the cost of self-denial. She also believed it was always best to tell the truth, to tell it plainly, without fanfare, and the more disagreeable the truth, the sooner you had to tell it.
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truth
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Khaled Hosseini |
3c58b35
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Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, Laila had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which Tariq's father sometimes played old Pashto songs, time stretched and contracted depending on Tariq's absence or presence.
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Khaled Hosseini |
4c88fea
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It's a funny thing, Markos, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.
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Khaled Hosseini |
e60381b
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cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.
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Khaled Hosseini |
cff86fe
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I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I'd always feared they would.
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Khaled Hosseini |
783cfd6
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Many years later when I began training as a plastic surgeon, I understood something that I had not that day in the kitchen arguing for Thalia to leave Tinos for the boarding school. 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. My patients knew this. They saw that much of what they..
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pain
world
beauty
dreams
hope
and-the-mountains-echoed
plastic-surgeon
khaled-hosseini
unfair
superficial
unfairness-of-life
sorrows
cruel
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Khaled Hosseini |
7896731
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I said to you, "Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen." These are only words. A father's tricks, It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how vast, how indifferent. How powerless I am to protect you from it. All I can do is pray."
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poetry
syria
refugees
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Khaled Hosseini |
d94d76c
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I was not altogether surprised to learn that she had taken her own life. I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.
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Khaled Hosseini |
5cf297b
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You changed the subject." "From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?"
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Khaled Hosseini |
45e137d
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I remember how I would eye with envy all the kids in our neighborhood, in my school, who had a little brother or sister. How bewildered I was by the way some of them treated each other, oblivious to their own good luck. They acted like wild dogs. Pinching, hitting, pushing, betraying one another any way they could think of. Laughing about it too. They wouldn't speak to one another. I didn't understand. Me, I spent most of my early years cra..
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Khaled Hosseini |
2ac9800
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I sat against one of the house's clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land... it surprised me. I'd been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn't. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistan humming under my feet. Maybe..
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the-voice-of-the-blood
land
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Khaled Hosseini |
682084b
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I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and I am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost,grasping for breath.
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Khaled Hosseini |
df2e9f0
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Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence.
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prudence
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Khaled Hosseini |
2c8e9f6
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And here she was now, over those boulders and parched hills, with a home of her own, a husband of her own, heading toward on final, cherished province: Motherhood. How delectable it was to think of this baby, baby, baby. How glorious it was to know that her love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being, to know that there was no need any longer for pebble games.
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Khaled Hosseini |
44cab88
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To see her, amid all of it. To see that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things.
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Khaled Hosseini |
f9d712f
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Mariam is in Laila's own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.
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Khaled Hosseini |
f34b44b
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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
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Khaled Hosseini |
0e14921
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For you, a thousand times over" -- Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner"
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Khaled Hosseini |
92938f3
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l'Tfl hm lDHy lHqyqyyn lm`rk lswfyyt lmzrw`@ bl'lGm. kn lswfyyt yHbwn 'n ykhby'w lmtfjrt dkhl l`b mlwn@ wbrq@ wdh 'msk bh Tfl nfjrt ll`b@ ltqT` l'Sb` 'w lyd b'kmlh, wbdhlk lystTy` l'b 'n ynDm l~ ljhd bl `lyh 'n ybq~ f~ lmnzl ly`tn~ bbnh.
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Khaled Hosseini |
a1dad07
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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.
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Khaled Hosseini |
c441942
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That was when I learned that, in America, you don't reveal the ending of the movie, and if you do, you will be scorned and made to apologize profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.
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Khaled Hosseini |
f97e703
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We'd each roll to our side of the bed and let our own savior take us away. Soraya's was sleep. Mine, as always, was a book.
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Khaled Hosseini |
7bcd1f5
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of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
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Khaled Hosseini |
bcd939b
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'ryd 'n 'r~ Hlm 'wld~ ytHqq, 'ryd 'n 'r~ lywm ldh~ syGdr fyh lswfyyt l~ bldhm mkllyn bl`r, lywm ldh~ ySn` lmjhdwn lnSr l~ kbwl. 'ryd 'n 'kwn hnk `ndm yHdth dhlk, `ndm t`wd 'fGnstn Hr@, syr~ l'wld dhlk 'yDa, syrwnh mn khll `yn~W
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Khaled Hosseini |