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I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.

Khaled Hosseini

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Khaled Hosseini
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: March 4
Medical Writer
Novelist
Physician
Physician Writer
Writer
Cabool
Book
Understood
Writing
Roles
Even
Playing
Really
Either
Occasionally
Never
Books
Intended
Think
Purpose
Novelists
Thinking
Write
Serving
Ends
Fully

More quotes by Khaled Hosseini

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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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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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I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.
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You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.
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All good things in life are fragile and easily lost
Khaled Hosseini
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In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.
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President Karzai is an incredibly kind and decent man. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he genuinely cares for his people. But I think he had too much of a tendency to want to rule by listening to all voices at all times.
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He knew I'd seen everything in that alley, that I'd stood there and done nothing. He knew that I'd betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time.
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Blood is a powerful thing
Khaled Hosseini
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Reading is an active, imaginative act it takes work.
Khaled Hosseini
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I'm gladly doing my own thing for the time being.
Khaled Hosseini
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In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.
Khaled Hosseini
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A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.
Khaled Hosseini
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If my book generates any sort of dialogue among Afghans, then I think it will have done a service to the community.
Khaled Hosseini
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The finger cut, to save the hand.
Khaled Hosseini
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America was different. America was a river, roarng along, unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins.
Khaled Hosseini
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I started a foundation, called The Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The mission has been to help the most vulnerable groups in Afghanistan. So the focus has been on women, children, and homeless refugees, most of whom are in fact women and children.
Khaled Hosseini
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You have think tanks like the widely respected Atlantic Council that have published reports in the past year that have called Afghanistan a failing state.
Khaled Hosseini
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Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
Khaled Hosseini
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If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.
Khaled Hosseini