A Thousand Splendid Suns Quotes

She had a voice, a gift, she knew it now, and she wanted to use it. She wanted to be heard.”

For you, a thousand times over.

It’s better to remember the bad things than to forget them and be fooled.

You know, I used to think that if I died, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about myself anymore. But I still worry. I worry about all of us.

She climbed the stairs, praying for strength. She wished for so many things – for love, and happiness, and a thousand other things. And all the while, somewhere in the back of her mind, she prayed not to bring him any more pain.

There was the sound of glass breaking. Laila looked up and saw that a windowpane on the second floor, right above the door, had shattered into a thousand splinters. Laila didn’t move as the glass rained all over the ground around her. She stayed where she was, looking up, and had her first glimpse of Mariam. She looked thinner, Laila thought. And there were lines on her face, in places where Laila hadn’t seen them before.

Mariam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back.

Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.

Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

In the end, the world always wins. That’s just the way of things.

Without you, I am nothing.

In one aspect, yes, I believe in Love at first sight. What is Love at first sight? It’s when you meet someone and you just know… you know that they’re going to be important to you, and you know that your life will never be the same with them in it.

She wore a key-shaped pendant around her neck that I had given her as a birthday present a few years ago. On the back was engraved a single word: Zamani. It means time.

Don’t be afraid to cry. It will free your mind of sorrowful thoughts.

Marriages are like fingerprints; each one is different and each one is beautiful.

She was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last.

You know, the most terrifying thing about love is that it leaves so little room for hate.

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

She went up to the wall. And she kissed it. Like this…

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

Once the world turns on you, who can you trust?

It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.

One day, it’s going to be okay. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or next week. But one day, it will be. You just have to hang on.

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated.

In the end, a society will be judged by how it treats its women.

It’s a funny thing, Afghan weddings. No matter how well you know the bride or groom, you always get seated with strangers.

On her way back from the hotel, Laila had waited for the first raindrops to fall – waited and waited – but the sky stayed empty as ever. There’d be no more rain. A shiver coursed down Laila’s spine. Her fingertips went to her belly. ‘You know what they say about light at the end of the tunnel,’ Laila said, and smiled to give his words levity, but her smile was not returned. ‘What do they say?’‘’It’s not always an illusion.’

She thought of Mariam and Aziza – Aziza with her hot, furious little heart, her big dark eyes and disarming frankness. Aziza, always an unintentional needle in her mother’s heart. But wasn’t that what Miriam had, in the end, come to love about her?

Laila walked the final steps to him. He held the baby aloft now, close to his face. The baby wrinkles her nose, touched his upper lip with her fingertips. Her eyes, Laila noticed, were the exact same color as Alsan’s. She talked to him in a singsong voice. Her laugh rippled, her dark eyes sparkling, as Tariq tickled her belly. Laila marveled at how every inch of this little girl, the angle of her jaw, the curl of her forehead, the tiny dimple on her earlobe, was a facsimile of Tariq.

Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have.

‎’I find it ironic,’ she said in a faint voice, ‘Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium… and yet neither of us tried the stuff.’‘There’s an Afghan prohibition,’” Laila said. ‘The Taliban banned it.’

You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.

Everywhere Laila looked, women were peeling back their burqas, free at last to look at the sky without a mesh screen.

You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.

It’s a funny thing, coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realized the what’s changed is you.

My treasure, he called her. He had called her that twice tonight. My treasure. Laila felt a guilty thrill, a hardening, an odd satisfaction thumping away in her chest. So this was being alive. She thought she might die of it.

A lump was forming in Laila’s throat. The idea before had been difficult to believe; that a girl like Mariam, who had been to so little in her life, who had lived in that tiny kolba with only her mother for company, would know more about love than she did. But now Laila saw that it was true. Mariam knew about love the way Laila had come to think of love – infatuation, longing, the violation of separateness. But this love that she had for her harami daughter – she’d never had it before. She’d truly never had it.

So she stiffened her upper lip, watched the men do their giddy, cheerful dance in the middle of the square, with their rifles dangling and their heads thrown back. They shouted patriotic slogans, and there was something so unselfconscious about their joy that Mariam envied them. What would it be like, she wondered, to live in a country, truly live in one, where war had not hollowed out the lives of generations? Mariam believed Rasheed when he said that every Afghan thinks of himself as a watchful shepherd; a good shepherd who looks after his flock and protects them from harm. And that, for him, was enough. It was enough for him to mourn the fact that Afghanistan had lost, one by one, its sons and daughters, that it had imploded, torched itself, erased its own history, made strangers of its people, and now hoped to find itself in “ancient” rituals of bloodletting and masochism and self-loathing. Mariam would give herself a moment here, with borrowed troops, to think of the life that she and Laila might have had together, a life into which Aziza would have been born, and that Zalmai might one day… She stopped there. She closed her fist. She prayed for the patience and the strength that she needed now. For Laila. For Zalmai. For Aziza. She asked Rasheed for his patience and his strength. She asked Allah for His.

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

I’m cherished, not forced upon.

If I marry you, I will have to distance myself from my father. Is that a sacrifice you are prepared for me to make?… I will gladly endure it if it means I can be with you.

If I were in control of the world, I’d make sure that every child had the chance to learn to read and to write. Imagine all the stories that would be told.

You’ve always been in my heart. I just needed to find you.

When love comes this strong, it’s irresistible. 4

I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it. But I didn’t, not really. Only the smudgeness of it; the pink blur and blur I would see when I closed my eyes. I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else. 4

It’s funny,” Laila said, her eyes tearing, “how, all my life, I have been reading about her, reading about how she was longing for me all those years. And then the second I saw her, I felt nothing. I felt absolutely nothing.” 4

She wants me to make a decision…in a culture where she knows I’ll get into trouble for making a decision. Whatever I do, I’ll fall into either a trap or into a chasm. 4

As the California sun descends into the late afternoon, I feel an electric warmth on the skin beneath my nail polish, on the nape of my neck, on the low strands bleached to a golden sheen by the sun. And, for a moment, I am in Kabul too. 50. One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.