“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

“… 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 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

“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

“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