The Kite Runner
“Baba wet his hair and combed it back. I helped him in a clean white shirt and knotted his tie for him, noting the two inches of empty space between the collar button and Baba’s neck. I thought of all the empty spaces Baba would leave behind when he was gone, and I made myself think of something else.”
from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini pg. 162
The Kite Runner
“… I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering it things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini pg. 359
The Kite Runner
“The blast echoes through the street of my father’s house. Hassan slumps to the asphalt, his life of unrequited loyalty drifting from him like the windblown kites he used to chase.”
from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini pg. 219
The Kite Runner
“Sometimes, Soraya sleeping next to me, I lay in bed a listened to the screen door swinging open and shut in the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of the room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.”
from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini pg. 189
The Kite Runner
“I firmly believed that if I had picked up a rifle and gone on a murdering rampage, I would have still had the benefit of her unblinking love. Because I have rid her heart of its greatest malady. I had relieved her of the greatest fear of every Afghan mother: that no honorable khastegar would ask for her daughter’s hand. That her daughter would age alone, husband-less, childless. Every woman needed a husband. Even if he did silence the song in her.”
from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini pg. 178
Of Human Bondage
“Phillip was moved into the Sixth, but he hated school now with all his heart, and, having lost his ambition, cared nothing whether he did ill or well. He awoke in the morning with a sinking heart because he must go through another day of drudgery. He was tired of doing things because he was told; and the restrictions irked him, not because they were unreasonable, but because they were restrictions. He yearned for freedom. He was weary of repeating things he knew already and of the hammering away, for the sake of a thick-witted fellow, at something he understood from the beginning.”
from Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
A Long Way Gone
“These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which triggers memories from the past.”
from A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah pg. 20
The Road
“Just remember that the things you put into your head are forever, he said. You might want to think about that.”
“You forget some things, don’t you?”
“Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
from The Road by Cormac McCarthy pg. 12
The Thirteenth Tale
“We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.”
from The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield pg. 477
The Thirteenth Tale
“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some their is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like lies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
from The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield pgs. 20-21
