The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, is about a young boy and his friend in Afghanistan.
Amir and Hassan are best friends. Hassan is the most loyal friend one can have. Amir flies kites, and Hassan is the best kite runner in the world.
But Hassan and his father, Ali, are servants of Amir and his father, Baba. Amir desires his father’s admiration, and he’s jealous that Baba treats Hassan like a son.
Although Hassan is Amir’s best friend, he is ashamed to be associated with a poor Hazara. Amir is a rich coward, and Hassan is a courageous servant.
When Amir is too scared to help Hassan when he is attacked, he does everything he can to remove him from his life. But Amir must overcome his fears and make it up to Hassan.
The Kite Runner Quotes With Page Numbers
“It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 1, Page 1
“For you, a thousand times over”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Hassan), Chapter 1, Page 2, 67, 70, 194, 239, 305, and 371
“There is a way to be good again…”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 1, Page 2, 192, 226, and 310
“People say that eyes are windows to the soul.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 2, Page 8
“On a high mountain I stood,
And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.
O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men,
Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Ali), Chapter 2, Page 11
“There was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that even time could not break.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 2, Page 11
“Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.
Mine was Baba.
His was Amir. My name.
Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975 —and all that followed— was already laid in those first words.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 2, Page 11
“The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 3, Page 15
“I see you’ve confused what you’re learning in school with actual education.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Baba), Chapter 3, Page 16
“there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life… you steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a ather. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness… there is no act more wretched than stealing.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Baba), Chapter 3, Pages 17, 18
“Rahim Khan laughed. “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Rahim Khan), Chapter 3, Page 21
“Rahim, a boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Rahim quoting Baba), Chapter 3, Pages 22, and 221
“Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.
Never mind any of those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion.
In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.”~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 4, Page 25
“If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thous didst it of thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting…”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 4, Page 29
“Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 4, Page 30
“It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife’s slain body in his arms.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 4, Page 31
“The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 5, Page 36
“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, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 5, Page 38
“Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians would eventually learn by the late 1980’s: that Afghans are an independent people. Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting. The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 6, Pages 51, 52
“Except that wasn’t all. The real fun began when a kite was cut. That was where the kite runners came in, those kids who chased the windblown kite drifting through the neighborhoods until it came spiraling down in a field, dropping in someone’s yard, on a tree or a rooftop. The chase got pretty fierce; hordes of kite runners swarmed the streets, shoved past each other like those people from Spain I’d read about once, the ones who ran from the bulls. One year a neighborhood kid climbed a pine tree for a kite. A branch snapped under his weight and he fell thirty feet. Broke his back and never walked again. But he fell with the kite still in his hands. And when a kite runner has his hands on a kite, no one could take it from him. That wasn’t a rule. That was a custom.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 6, Page 52
“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 6, Page 55
“But coming close wasn’t the same as winning, was it? … He had won because winners won and everyone else just went home”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 6, Page 56
“Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Hassan), Chapter 6, Page 58
“There’s no monster…just a beautiful day.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Hassan), Chapter 7, Page 61
“Hassan couldn’t read a first-grade textbook but he’d read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 7, Page 62
“And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 7, Page 65
“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.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 7, Page 73
“A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn’t have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 8, Page 86
“In the end, the world always wins. That’s just the way of things.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Rahim Khan), Chapter 8, Page 99
“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. ”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 9, Page 105
“I loved him in that moment, loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone, and I wanted to to tell them all that I was the snake in the grass, the monster in the lake. I wasn’t worthy of this sacrifice; I was a liar, a cheat, a thief. And I would have told, except that a part of me was glad. Glad that this would all be over with soon. Baba would dismiss them, there would be some pain, but life would move on. I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 9, Page 105
“Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 10, Pages 114, 170
“War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Baba), Chapter 10, Page 115
“Panic. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you’re breaithing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. Cut you have to breathe to scream. Panic.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 10, Page 121
“I lay on the side of the dirt road next to a rocky trench, looked up to the gray morning sky, thankful for air, thankful for light, thankful to be alive.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 10, Page 123
“I didn’t remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become. ”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 10, Page 123
“After everything he’d built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 10, Page 124
“I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He’d carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he’d pull for us from the tandoor’s roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 11, Page 128
“Baba dropped the stack of food stamps on her desk. “Thank you but I don’t want,” Baba said. “I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don’t like it free money.”…Baba walked out of the welfare office like a man cured of a tumor. ”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator and Baba), Chapter 11, Pages 130, 131
“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, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 11, Page 136
“Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine.
Held for a moment.
Flew away.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 11, Page 140
“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime…”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 11, Page 142
“Sad stories make good books”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Soraya), Chapter 12, Page 147
“It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 12, Page 155
“All my life, I’d been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 13, Page 171
“Every woman needed a husband. Even if he did silence the song in her.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 13, Page 178
“There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 13, Page 183
“Life is a train, get on board.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 13, Page 185
“Blood is a powerful thing”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 13, Pages 187, 188, and 310
“Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with 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 love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child. ”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 13, Page 189
“We’d each roll to our side of the bed and let our own savior take us away. Soraya’s was sleep. Mine, as always, was a book.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 14, Page 193
“A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: ‘Avoid them like the plague.’ Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 15, Page 197
“Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price?”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Rahim Khan), Chapter 15, Page 201
“I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Rahim Khan), Chapter 15, Page 201
“it is a heartBreaking sound, Amir Jan, the Wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you Never hear it.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 16, Page 209
“I guess some stories do not need telling.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 16, Page 211
“it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 16, Page 211
“Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 17, Page 214
“And I dream that someday you will return to Kabul to revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 17, Page 218
“In his rearview mirror, I saw something flash in his eyes. “You want to know?” he sneered. “Let me imagine, Agha sahib. You probably lived in a big two- or three-story house with a nice backyard that your gardener filled with flowers and fruit trees. All gated, of course. Your father drove an American car. You had servants, probably Hazaras. Your parents hired workers to decorate the house for the fancy mehmanis they threw, so their friends would come over to drink and boast about their travels to Europe or America. And I would bet my first son’s eyes that this is the first time you’ve ever worn a pakol.” He grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of prematurely rotting teeth. “Am I close?”
Why are you saying these things?” I said.
Because you wanted to know,” he spat. He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path, a large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. “That’s the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That’s the Afghanistan I know. You? You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Farid and Amir), Chapter 19, Page 232
“I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land… it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistan humming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me either. I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle. Somewhere over those mountains in the west slept the city where my harelipped brother and I had run kites. Somewhere over there, the blindfolded man from my dream had died a needless death. Once, over those mountains, I had made a choice. And now, a quarter of a century later, that choice had landed me right back on this soil.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 19, Pages 240, 241
“I noticed Wahid’s boys, all three thin with dirt-caked faces and short-cropped brown hair under their skull caps, stealing furative glances at my digital wristwatch.
…I unsnapped the wristwatch and gave it to the youngest of the three boys. He muttered a sheepish “Tashakor.”
“It tells you the time in any city in the world,” I told him. The boys, nodding politely passing the watch between them, taking turns trying it on. But they lost interest and, soon the watch sat abandoned on the straw mat.
…I understood now why the boys hadn’t shown any interest in the watch. They hadn’t been staring at the watch at all. They’d been staring at my food.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator and Farid), Chapter 19, Page 241
“The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: The Old Man), Chapter 20, Page 249
“She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said, ‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: The Old Woman), Chapter 20, Page 250
“Take two Afghans who’ve never met, put them in a room for ten minutes, and they’ll figure out how they’re related.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir quoting Baba, Chapter 20, Page 251
“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.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 22, Page 275
“My body was broken – just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later – but I felt healed. Healed at last.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 22, Page 289
“Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir), Chapter 22, Page 297
“A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 22, Page 301
“And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father’s remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 22, Page 302
“I know that in the end, God will forgive me. He will forgive your father, me, and you too. I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive me if you wish. But most important, forgive yourself.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 22, Page 302
“It’s wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don’t know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Sorab), Chapter 24, Page 319
“In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 24, Page 333
“One time, when I was very little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I’d just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn’t have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Sohrab), Chapter 24, Page 340
“That’s how children deal with terror, they fall asleep.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 24, Page 342
“I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Page 345
“I throw my makeshift jai-namaz, my prayer rug, on the floor and I get on my knees, lower my forehead to the ground, my tears soaking through the sheet. I bow to the west. Then I remember I haven’t prayed for over fifteen years. I have long forgotten the words. But it doesn’t matter, I will utter those few words I still remember: La illaha ila Allah, Muhammad u rasul ullah. There’s no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger. I see now that Baba was wrong, there’s a God, there always had been. I see Him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him, not the white masjid with its bright diamond lights, and towering minarets. There’s a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need, I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is. […] I hear a whimpering and realize it is mine, my lips are salty with the tears trickling down my face. I feel the eyes of everyone in this corridor on me and still I bow to the west. I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way I’d always feared they would.”
~Khalid Hosseini, The Kite Runner,, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Pages 345-346
“I will do namaz, I will do zakat.
They would have lost him if his heart hadn’t been young and strong─
I will fast.
He is alive.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Page 348
“Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Page 356
“lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Page 356
“That was when I learned that, in America, you don’t reveal the ending of the movie, and if you do, you will be scorned and made to apologize profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Page 357
“Was there happiness at the end [of the movie], they wanted to know.
If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn’t know what to say.
Does anybody’s?
After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Afghans like to say: Life goes on, undmindful of beginning, en, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis. ”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Page 357
“…and when she locked her arms around my neck, when I smelled apples in her hair, I realized how much I had missed her. ‘You’re still the morning sun to me…’ I whispered.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir), Chapter 25, Page 357
“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Page 359
“And one more thing…You will never again refer to him as ‘Hazara boy’ in my presence. He has a name and it’s Sohrab.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Baba), Chapter 25, Page 361
“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir), Chapter 25, Page 361
“For you, a thousand times over.” Then I turned and ran. It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything alright. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. But I’ll take it. With open arms.”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator quoting Hassan), Chapter 25, Page 371
“Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time”
~Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, (Character: Amir as the Narrator), Chapter 25, Page 371
The Kite Runner Summary
The Kite Runner is a book about identity, redemption, and the search for belonging. It follows the life of Amir, an Afghan immigrant who is plagued by guilt from the past.
As he struggles to make sense of his life in a foreign land, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery. Along the way, he revisits his homeland and confronts the difficult truths of his past.
He must ultimately make difficult choices to move forward and discover what being at home means.
The Kite Runner is a story of growth and understanding, as the main character, Amir, experiences a journey of self-discovery in the wake of his mistakes.
As he navigates the complexities of his relationships with friends and family, Amir grapples with his guilt and the impact of his actions, eventually learning that accepting responsibility is essential to growth and redemption.
This story is set in Afghanistan and America. It explores loyalty, family, morality, and redemption themes as Amir learns that it is never too late to make amends and that courage and hope can ultimately lead to a better future.
The Kite Runner is an intense and stirring examination of intricate subjects, for instance, camaraderie, faithfulness, double-crossing, equity, religion, and fondness.
It’s an affecting tale that will remain with readers after they finish the book. Hosseini has made convincing and recognizable characters, making the story reverberate much more.
Hosseini’s composition has made a remarkable account that will leave readers feeling encouraged and touched by the intensity of restoration.
Further Reading: