“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“It's a funny thing... 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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from 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, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from 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, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“J’aurais dû être 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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“All good things in life are fragile and easily lost”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from 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, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from 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, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from 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, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“The finger cut, to save the hand.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“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.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.”
― Khaled Hosseini, quote from And the Mountains Echoed
“Plato said, be kind to everyone you meet for we are all fighting difficult battles.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Styxx
“-¿A qué clase de monstruo no le gusta el chocolate?” Will Herondale”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Clockwork Angel; Clockwork Prince; Clockwork Princess
“But this love would leave behind it nothing so definite as a piece of Chijimi. Though cloth to be worn is among the most short-lived of craftworks, a good piece of Chijimi, if it has been taken care of, can be worn quite unfaded a half-century and more after weaving. As Shimamura thought absently how human intimacies have not even so long a life, the image of Komako as the mother of another man’s children suddenly floated into his mind. He looked around, startled. Possibly he was tired.
He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely. He stood gazing at his own coldness, so to speak. He could not understand how she had so lost herself. All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He “heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew that he could not go on pampering himself forever.
He leaned against the brazier, provided against the coming of the snowy season, and thought how unlikely it was that he would come again once he had left. The innkeeper had lent him an old Kyoto teakettle, skillfully inlaid in silver with flowers and birds, and from it came the sound of wind in the pines. He could make out two pine breezes, as a matter of fact, a near one and a far one. Just beyond the far breeze he heard faintly the tinkling of a bell. He put his ear to the kettle and listened. Far away, where the bell tinkled on, he suddenly saw Komako’s feet, tripping in time with the bell. He drew back. The time had come to leave.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, quote from Snow Country
“In the name of the Pizza Lord. Charge!”
― Jim Butcher, quote from Summer Knight
“I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.
I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.”
― Paul Auster, quote from Moon Palace
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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