And the mountains echoed

Khalid hosseini is the most brilliant storyteller. He has a remarkable ability to show the human side of the so called ‘villains’ and inhuman side of the so called ‘heroes’, by positioning the narrators as people who love them or have a view of them which no one else has. The story of Afghanistan is shown thru a labyrinth of characters, all originating at one point, interconnected but landing all over the world to France, America, Greece, with stops on the way in India, Iceland, Egypt, Spain. 

It breaks your notions as a reader about the back story of various characters causing a plethora of emotions you never knew you could feel for a set of imaginary characters. Each of them real and alive in front of you, like a family member lost in the sands of time. 

Khalid’s books have taught me so much about empathy and humanness, to love and forgive, courage and strength, survival and resilience. The dichotomy of human fragility and strength intertwined in such beautiful web of stories, your only wish is for this world to be a bit more kind and caring. 

And then there are pearls of quotes, making you feel such deep emotions as if they are written on your own state of mind and heart! 

A story is like a moving train : no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later. 

People learned to live with the most unimaginable things. As would he. This was his life. That was his mother. This was his father. And this was him, even if he hadn’t always known it. 

I knew right then that I couldn’t bear to see it, whatever the mask was hiding. And that I couldn’t wait to see it. 

This is an old habit, this joke making and clowning in the face of bad luck, this disdain of hers for the slightest show of self pity. It has the paradoxical - and I know calculated- effect of both shrinking and augmenting the misfortune. 

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly. 

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. 

The air is heavy with sickness. It’s not quite a smell; rather, it’s like a physical presence. Every doctor knows this. Sickness permeates a room like steam. 

It’s a funny thing, but people mostly have it backwards. Think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they are afraid of. What they don’t want.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your em org life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand. 

Time is like a charm. You never have as much as you think. 

She had very deep sadness. All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me. 

I should have been more kind. This is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old. Ah, I wish I was not good to that person.