Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist, UNHCR goodwill ambassador, and former physician. He is best known for writing about the Afghan experience, explored in the quotes below. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, to a diplomat father, Hosseini spent some time living in Iran and France. When Hosseini was 15, his family applied for asylum in the United States, where he later became a naturalized citizen. Hosseini did not return to Afghanistan until 2003 when he was 38, an experience similar to that of the protagonist of his first novel, The Kite Runner.
Hosseini’s Books
The Kite Runner
The Kite Runner is the story of a young boy, Amir, struggling to form a deeper connection with his father and coping with memories of a traumatic childhood event. The novel is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy until the collapse of the Taliban regime, as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically in Fremont, California.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Hosseini’s second novel was A Thousand Splendid Suns, published in 2007. As his first novel, this story is also set in Afghanistan. It takes many of the same themes of his first book but tells the story from a female perspective. We follow two women, Mariam and Laila, whose lives become entwined when Mariam’s husband takes on Laila as a second wife. The story is set during Afghanistan’s tumultuous thirty-year transition from Soviet occupation to Taliban control and post-Taliban rebuilding.
And the Mountains Echoed
And the Mountains Echoed, published 10 years ago today, is Hosseini’s third novel, set in Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and stepmother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters.
To Abdullah, Pari – as beautiful and sweet-natured as the fairy for which she was named – is everything. More like a parent than a brother, Abdullah will do anything for her, even trading his only pair of shoes for a feather for her treasured collection. Each night they sleep together in their cot, their heads touching, their limbs tangled. One day the siblings journey across the desert to Kabul with their father. Pari and Abdullah have no sense of the fate that awaits them there, for the event which unfolds will tear their lives apart; sometimes a finger must be cut to save the hand.
Crossing generations and continents, moving from Kabul to Paris, to San Francisco, to the Greek island of Tinos, with profound wisdom, depth, insight, and compassion, Khaled Hosseini writes about the bonds that define us and shape our lives, the ways in which we help our loved ones in need, how the choices we make resonate through history and how we are often surprised by the people closest to us.
Here are some of the most emotional and heartbreaking quotes from Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed:
What was I supposed to be, growing in your womb — assuming it was even in our womb that I was conceived? A seed of hope? A ticket purchased to ferry you from the dark? A patch for that hole you carried in your heart? If so, then I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t nearly enough. I was no balm to your pain, only another dead end, another burden, and you must have seen that early on. You must have realized it. But what could you do? You couldn’t go down to the pawnshop and sell me.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Father’s world was unsparing. Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
I know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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 world will not destroy you.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
I’ve read that if an avalanche buries you and you’re lying there underneath all that snow, you can’t tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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. I should have been more kind.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
But these were gestures, Abdullah knew, acts of duty, drawn from a well far shallower than the one she reached into for Iqbal.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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 of a novel that I’d started, then abandoned, long ago.
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
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