And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

 

"For courage, there must be something at sake. I come here with nothing to lose"

"Pari was the only person in the world who would never, could never, hurt him. Some days, Abdullah felt she was the only true family he had"

"No one but god knows why those two had chosen each other. It was a mystery. I have never seen such affinity between two things"

"... I won't say that was enough for me but it was better than not being with you."

"I need to tell you, if only this once, that I loved you a long, long time..."

"It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be."

"I had run once before from someone who needed me, and the remorse I still feel I will take with me to the grave."

"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."

"I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse."

"In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, the boundless brutality."

"He has never done anything like this. There is something exhilarating, intoxicating, euphoric even, in throwing himself headlong into this commitment.He feels energized. It nearly takes his breath away. To his own amazement, tears pickle his eyes."

"Do you think we have to have all this?"

"Seeing her father's face in those photos stirred an old sensation in Pari, a feeling that she had ha for as long as she could remember. That there was in her life absence of something, someone, fundamental to her own existence. Sometimes it vague, like a message sent across shadow byways and vast distances, a weak signal on a radio dial, remote, warbled. Other times it felt so clear, this absence, so intimately close it made her heart lurch."

"-Do you have a camera?
-No
-Have you ever taken a picture?
-No
-And you want to be a photographer?
-You find that strange?
-A little
-So if I said I wanted to be a policeman, you'd think that was strange too?"

"..I asked her if she'd cried when my father had fallen to his death.
-At the funeral? I mean, the burial?
-No, I did not
-Because you weren't sad?
-Because it was nobody's business if I was"

"I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to."

"My father said all good things in life were fragile and easily lost"

"I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret."

"...I sensed only an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like the patient who cannot explain to the doctor where it hurts, only that it does"

"Only that when we lost each other, ...it hurt hin much more than me. I was the lucky one because I was protected by my youth.... I still had the luxury of forgetting. He did not"