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A Thousand Splendid Suns

Book by Khaled Hosseini · 5 quotes · Love, War, Afghanistan

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A Thousand Splendid Suns Quotes

“Maybe this is necessary. Maybe there will be hope when Bush's bombs stop falling. But she cannot bring herself to say it, not when what happened to Babi and Mammy is happening to someone now in Afghanistan, not when some unsuspecting girl or boy back home has just been orphaned by a rocket as she was. Laila cannot bring herself to say it. It's hard to rejoice. It seems hypocritical, perverse.”

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“It's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more than anything." Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black window, their shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a bare-handed frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild. But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't.”

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“The Bamiyan Valley below was carpeted by lush farming fields. Babi said they were green winter wheat and alfafa, potatoes too... It was autumn, and Laila could make out people in bright tunics on the roofs of mud brick dwellings laying out the harvest to dry... Beyond the village, beyond the river and the streams, Laila saw foothills, bare and dusty brown, and, beyond those, as beyond everything else in Afghanistan, the snowcapped Hindu Kush. The sky above all of this was an immaculate, spotless blue. "It's so quiet," Laila breathed... "It's what I always remember about being up here," Babi said, "The silence. The peace of it. I wanted you to experience it. But I also wanted you to see your country's heritage, children, to learn of its rich past. You seem some things I can teach you. Some you can learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to *see* and *feel*.”

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