A Thousand Splendid Suns Quotes With Page Numbers Part 1
“Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Character: Nana, Chapter 1, Page 7
“Look at me, Mariam.’
Reluctantly, Mariam did.
Nana said, ‘Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Character: Nana, Chapter 1, Page 7
“A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Character: Nana, Chapter 5, Page 27
“Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Character: Mullah Faizullah, Chapter 6, Page 38
“Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Character: Nana, Chapter 13, Page 91
“Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she’d said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Character: The Narrator about Mariam, Chapter 13, Page 91
“Give sustenance, Allah.
Give sustenance to me.”~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Character: Mariam, Chapter 14, Page 96
A Thousand Splendid Suns Part Two
“You’re not going to cry, are you?
– I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Characters: Laila and Tariq’s parents, Chapter 16, Page 107
“Nine-year-old Laila rose from bed, as she did most mornings, hungry for the sight of her friend Tariq. This morning, however, she knew there would be no Tariq sighting.
– How long will you be gone? – She’d asked when Tariq had told her that his parents were
taking him south, to the city of Ghazni, to visit his paternal uncle.
– Thirteen days
– Thirteen days?
– It’s not so long. You’re making a face, Laila.
– I am not.
– You’re not going to cry, are you?
– I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.She’d kicked at his shin, not his artificial but his real one, and he’d playfully whacked
the back of her head.Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, Laila had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which Tariq’s father sometimes played old Pashto songs, time stretched and contracted depending on Tariq’s absence or presence.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Characters: Laila and Tariq’s parents, Chapter 16, Pages 107, 08
“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Characters: Babi to Laila, Chapter 16, Page 114
“I know you’re still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You’re a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Characters: Babi to Laila, Chapter 16, Page 114
“A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated…”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Characters: Babi to Laila, Chapter 16, Page 114
“People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Character:The Narrator), Chapter 17, Page 119
“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 18, Page 126
“Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 19, Page 133
“Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can’t breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Mammy (Fariba), Chapter 20, Page 143
“She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed. ”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Mammy), Chapter 20, Page 144
“And that, …is the story of our country, one invasion after another…Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The driver to Babi), Chapter 21, Page 146
“You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Babi to Tariq), Chapter 21, Page 149
“Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn’t understand. She didn’t understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her. ”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 21, Page 151
“If I everdo get married,” Tariq said, “they’ll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Tariq), Chapter 22, Pages 156, 157
“Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Laila to Tariq), Chapter 23, Page 168
“You changed the subject.”
“From what?”
“The empty-headed girls who think you’re sexy.”
“You know.”
“Know what?”
“That I only have eyes for you.”~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Characters: Laila and Tariq), Chapter 23, Page 170
“Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. “For you,” he said. “I’d kill with it for you, Laila.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Characters: The Narrator and Tariq to Laila), Chapter 24, Page 176
“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.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 25, Page 182
“With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory’s grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion–like the phantom pain of an amputee.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 26, Page 187
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Laila recalling a poem about Kabul), Chapter 26, Pages 192, 392
A Thousand Splendid Suns Part 3
“A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Abdul Sharif to Mariam), Chapter 28, Page 205
“The Chinese say it’s better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Laila to Mariam), Chapter 34, Page 250
“Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion”.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (The Narrator about love), Chapter 35, Page 256
“the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (The Narrator about love), Chapter 35, Page 256
“And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Mariam), Chapter 35, Page 256
“She thought of Aziza’s stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Aziza), Chapter 42, Page 326
“And I wrote you.
Volumes.
Volumes.”~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Charcters: Tariq and Laila), Chapter 44, Pages 338, 339
“…she is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Mariam to Laila), Chapter 46, Page 359
“Though there had been moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Mariam), Chapter 47, Page 370
“and yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. she was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. a person of consequence at last.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Mariam), Chapter 47, Page 370
“Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Mariam), Chapter 47, Page 370
“Though there had been moments of beauty in it Mariam knew that life for most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. She wished she could see Laila again, wished to hear the clangor of her laugh, to sit with her once more for a pot of chai and leftover halwa under a starlit sky. She mourned that she would never see Aziza grow up, would not see the beautiful young woman that she would one day become, would not get to paint her hands with henna and toss noqul candy at her wedding. She would never play with Aziza’s children. She would have liked that very much , to be old and play with Aziza’s children.
Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad , Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Mariam), Chapter 47, Page 370
“I’ll follow you to the end of the world.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Tariq to Laila), Chapter 50, Page 391
“I’m sorry,” Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Laila), Chapter 50, Page 395
“A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Mariam), Chapter 50, Page 401
“Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll’s head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl’s eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila’s salvation.
The little girl looks up. Puts the doll down. Smiles.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Mariam), Chapter 50, Page 401
“Regret… when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Jalil Khan in a letter to Mariam), Chapter 50, Page 405
“Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Jalil Khan in a letter to Mariam), Chapter 50, Page 405
“Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 51, Page 411
“But Laila has decided that she will not be crippled by resentment. Mariam wouldn’t want it that way. ‘What’s the sense?’ she would say with a smile both innocent and wise. ‘What good is it, Laila jo?’ And so Laila has resigned herself to moving on. For her own sake, for Tariq’s, for her children’s. And for Mariam, who still visits Laila in her dreams, who is never more than a breath or two below her consciousness. Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 51, Page 411
“Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not,
Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not.
If a flood should arrive, to drown all that’s alive,
Noah is your guide in the typhoon’s eye, grieve not.”~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: Zaman wrote his favorite lines from Hafez’s ghazals), Chapter 51, Page 413
“She wished she could visit Mariam’s grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But she sees now that it doesn’t matter. Mariam is never very far… Mariam is in her own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 51, Page 414
“But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her”
~Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, (Character: The Narrator about Laila), Chapter 51, Page 418
The Best Book Quotes With Page Numbers
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