Khaled Hosseini Quotes

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

I know what it's like when you are a refugee, living on the mercy of others and having to adjust.

Displacement is very tough on the people who are displaced and for the country that is hosting them.

I've seen mothers and children really being vulnerable in the refugee camps; it's supposed to be temporary, but they end up having children who have grown up in refugee camps.

The year when I left my country, there was still peace. The year after, the war broke out, a lot of people lost their homes, lost their families. When I go back 20 years later I still find people living in refugee camps. So I tried to help them find homes.

They are safe but they are not in their homes. They are city-less. I think it's just a disaster for everyone.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

People have been born in refugee camps and they are getting tired of that.

One day I am at home, watching dramatic images of Iraqi Yazidis fleeing for their lives being aired nonstop on 24-hour news channels. Days later, I am there, staring at tens of thousands of displaced Iraqis and feeling a 35-millimeter frame cannot capture the scope of devastation and heartbreak before me.

Most human experience has been that of statelessness.

I talk all the time about the eight-year-old me and all the eight-year-olds who are living in their camps.

When we were in Egypt, we were refugees. My family and I were homeless. For five years, out of all of the countries in the world that my father was contacting, the only one that took us in was England.

When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it's not something you want to remember or think about.

Almost every continent in the world, including our own, has refugees. But how often when we hear the word do we pause to remind ourselves what being a refugee means?

Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.

I am the face of a refugee. I was once a refugee. I was with my family in exile.

We brought disaster upon... Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave... We have rendered them dispossessed... We have accustomed them to begging... We have participated in lowering their moral and social level... Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon... men, women and children - all this in service of political purposes...

I've been working for refugees for years and years and years.

Refugees are the human dimensions of a failed state.

There should be a global commitment to try and get rid of UNHCR refugee camps and long-term people in those camps.

I was the child of refugees.

I can't understand why someone wouldn't have a degree of sympathy for people that had to flee their country, travel to try and find their home somewhere, and nobody wants them. How could you not be a little bit sympathetic?

You lose your home, you lose your community, you lose your school, you lose your stuff.

I grew up in a refugee camp. Thirty years. This so-called human-rights world didn't ask me what was happening for me to be there 30 years.

While migration is inevitable, the fact remains that most people leave their homes to escape violence and the certain persecution that comes from it.