Quotes from The Bookseller of Kabul

Åsne Seierstad ·  288 pages

Rating: (35.6K votes)


“When a man has everything and does not know what more to do, he tries to teach his donkey to talk.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul


“What the sounds and smells do not divulge, gossip supplies. It spreads like wildfire in the neighborhood, where everyone is watching one another's morals.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul


“War was a central theme in maths books too. School books - because the Taliban printed books soley for boys - did not calcualte in apples and cakes, but in bullets and kalasnikovs. Something like this: 'little Omar has a kalasnikov with three magazines. There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He uses two thirds of the bullets and kills sixty infidels does he kill with each bullet?”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul


“Anonymity became a release, the only place to which I could turn.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul


“In Afghanistan a woman’s longing for love is taboo. It is forbidden by the tribes’ notion of honor and by the mullahs. Young people have no right to meet, to love, or to choose. Love has little to do with romance; on the contrary, love can be interpreted as committing a serious crime, punishable by death.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul



“They played a game of dare - who could get closest to the flames?”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul


“Do you know what is our problem? We know everything about our weapons, but we know nothing about how to use a telephone.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul


“There are many things one can think of when one needs someone to vent one’s wrath on.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul


“Los talibanes eran poco versados en la historia islámica o afgana, y tampoco les interesaba lo más mínimo.”
― Åsne Seierstad, quote from The Bookseller of Kabul


About the author

Åsne Seierstad
Born place: in Oslo, Norway
Born date February 10, 1970
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“If he stayed at home and carried on with his normal life he would be a thousand times superior to these people and could get any of them out of his way just with a kick.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Trial


“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined. ”
― Arundhati Roy, quote from The God of Small Things


“That’s when it happened. So fast, in fact, that we didn’t even realize it had happened. All we knew was that one instant we were sitting at a lovely outdoor table toasting the beautiful day, and the next our table was on the move, crashing its way through the sea of other tables, banging into innocent bystanders, and making a horrible, ear-piercing, industrial-grade shriek as it scraped over the concrete pavers.”
― John Grogan, quote from Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog


“[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.”
― C.S. Lewis, quote from The Screwtape Letters


“Well,” Tessa said, sighting along the line of the knife, “you behave as if you dislike me. In fact, you behave as if you dislike us all.”
“I don’t,” Gabriel said. “I just dislike him.” He pointed at Will.
“Dear me,” said Will, and he took another bite of his apple. “Is it because I’m better-looking than you?”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Clockwork Prince


Interesting books

Thousand Cranes
(6.8K)
Thousand Cranes
by Yasunari Kawabata
The Murder on the Links
(27.6K)
The Murder on the Li...
by Agatha Christie
Speaking from Among the Bones
(27K)
Speaking from Among...
by Alan Bradley
The Royal We
(31.5K)
The Royal We
by Heather Cocks
The Bacchae
(10.7K)
The Bacchae
by Euripides
The 42nd Parallel
(5.1K)
The 42nd Parallel
by John Dos Passos

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.