The Kite Runner Quotes
"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."
"When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees... giggling, laughing; I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face."
"My father, my Baba, had built the most beautiful house in the Wazir Akbar Khan district."
"You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little."
"There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft."
"Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors."
"I think maybe you’ll win the tournament this year. What do you think?"
"But made up or not, the silly dream had lifted some of my anxiety."
"But when a Koran ayat I had learned in my diniyat class rose to my lips, I muttered it."
"Caught between Baba and the mullahs at school, I still hadn’t made up my mind about God."
"That was the thing about kite flying: Your mind drifted with the kite."
"I didn’t know what the other guy was playing for, maybe just bragging rights. But this was my one chance to become someone who was looked at, not seen, listened to, not heard."
"If Baba was wrong and there was a God like they said in school, then He’d let me win."
"It’s his price for letting us pass," Karim said.
"War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace."
"Air wasn’t supposed to be solid. I wanted to reach out with my hands, crush the air into little pieces, stuff them down my windpipe."
"What’ll save us is eight cylinders and a good carburetor."
"Our twin shadows dance on the rippling grass."
"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."
"My eyes returned to our suitcases. They made me sad for Baba. 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."
"He won’t breathe! My boy won’t breathe!" he was crying. Kamal’s lifeless body lay on his father’s lap."
"Baba loved the idea of America. It was living in America that gave him an ulcer."
"He loathed Jimmy Carter, whom he called a 'big-toothed cretin.'"
"Baba believed Carter had unwittingly done more for communism than Leonid Brezhnev."
"Baba was the lone Republican in our building."
"For two years, I tried to get Baba to enroll in ESL classes to improve his broken English."
"I remember the two of us walking through Lake Elizabeth Park in Fremont, a few streets down from our apartment."
"I was about to say more when the woman I’d seen on occasion with Soraya came walking up the aisle."
"A world of thanks for your benevolence, Agha sahib."
"The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts."
"But like the poet says: ‘How seamless seemed love and then came trouble!'"
"People cut them down for firewood in the winter."
"The streets are full enough already of hungry orphans."
"We can give him a new life here, new hope, with people who would love him."
"What you did was wrong, Amir jan, but do not forget that you were a boy when it happened. A troubled little boy."
"I hope your suffering comes to an end with this journey to Afghanistan."
"A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer."
"I hope you will heed this: A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer."
"What I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse."
"Sometimes, I think 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."
"But I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive me if you wish. But, most important, forgive yourself."
"I wouldn’t know what to say, where to look, so I gazed down at my hands."
"Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time."
"I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips."