Quotes from 'And the Mountains Echoed' That Make You Think

The idea of writing this novel originated on a trip to Afghanistan in 2007, when Khaled Hosseini heard agonizing stories of young, less fortunate village children dying during the winters. The plot of the novel dawned with the unjust and painful decision that a father has to make to sell his child, to avoid this from happening.

'And the Mountains Echoed', the third novel of Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-born American novelist, who is also the author of 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns', sold three million copies within five months of its publication.

The critics gave a very good response; Wendy Smith of 'Los Angeles Times' finding it 'painfully sad but also radiant with love'. 'The National' critic Fran Hawthorne described the book as 'masterful storytelling', and a 'haunting portrayal of war-ravaged Afghanistan and insight into the life of Afghan expatriates'.

The emotions in this book hold you onto it right till the end, with the echoes of ten-year-old Abdullah and his three-year-old sister Pari filling the mountains with their love, pain, and suffering.

★ "You know nothing of courage." said Baba Ayub. "For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose." You have your life to lose, said the div. "You already took that from me."

★ They weren't her children, he and Pari. Most people loved their own. It couldn't be helped that he and his sister didn't belong to her. They were another woman's leftovers.

★ The reason god had made hi, so he would be there to take care of pari when He took away their mother.

★ He was the one raising her. It was true. even though he was still a child himself. Ten years old.

★ I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

★ Then all your children would have perished, the div said, for they would have been cursed anyway, fathered as they were by a weak man. A coward who would see them all die rather than burden his own conscience. You say you have no courage, but it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. For that, I honor you.

★ Pari hovered, unbidden, at the edge of Abdullah's vision everywhere he went. She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell.

★ It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.

★ ...pretending he is one of them, like he's been here al along, like he wasn't lifting at Gold's in San Jose, working on his pecs and abs, when these people were getting shelled, murdered, raped. It is hypocritical, and distasteful. And it astonishes Idris that no one seems to see through his act.

★ We're not like these people. We shouldn't pretend we are.

★ It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

★ Pari did believe she would feel more whole if her father was still living, if he were here with her. But she also remembered feeling this way even as a child, living with both her parents at the big house in Kabul.

★ 'I look at you sometimes and I don't see me in you. Of course I don't. I suppose that isn't unexpected, after all. I don't know what sort of person you are, Pari. I don't know who you are, what you are capable of, in your blood. You're a stranger to me.

★ EB: Is your daughter a disappointment to you? NW: Iv'e come to believe she's my punishment.

★ A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds. That a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose.

★ She will not plant the seed in their mind, that a parent is capable of abandoning her children, of saying to them You are not enough. For Pari, the children and Eric have always been enough. They will always be.

★ Unaware she is weeping. A verse from a Farsi song suddenly tumbles to her tongue: I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.

★ Adel knew he would not love his father again as he had before.

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

★ It's a funny thing Markos, but people mostly have it backwards. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they're 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 own 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.

★ They say, find a purpose in your life and live it. But sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.

★ The word senseless springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

★ I see the creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing ... and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants.

★ I was told I could have died. Perhaps I should have. Dying can be quite the career move for a young poet.

★ ..if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out, but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.

★ I have a theory about marriage... its nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks.

★ She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose.

★ The world didn't see the inside of you..it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.

★ Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. ~Jelaluddin Rumi, 13th century

These quotes by Khaled Hosseini have deep meaning and beckon us to pause and think of how life is in different parts of the world, not necessarily the same as ours with all that we take for granted.