Khaled Hosseini Quotes

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

But then, my entire life is bullshit. The best things in it have vanished, ghosts. Ghosts I'll admit I created.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot -- the sail he has seen.

Even as she’d come to know the real Ralston—the Ralston who was not cut from heroic cloth—Callie had failed to see the truth. And, instead of seeing her own heartbreak coming, she had fallen in love, not with her fantasy, but with this new, flawed Ralston.

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

There is something truly restorative, finally comforting, in coming to the end of an illusion - a false hope.

I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it's gone, it's like there's nothing left of you at all . . . except what you can't be rid of.

Illusion is brief, but repentance is long.

The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.

Love is like a card trick. After you know how it works, it's no fun any more.

It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her.

Hope deceives more men than cunning does.

Hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

I should have known right then it was too good to last, God, it's such a drag when you're livin' in the past

Some people are better imagined in one's bed than found there in the morning.

I've been a fool to allow dreams to become great expectations.

...the moron who thought love was forever.

I know how ingratitude burns, how falsehood tortures, for I have been deceived in friendship and in love; I have learned to lose and to resign myself.

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

The worst thing you can do to a man is to tell him he can have what he wants.

...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.

False hope is clung to with all one's might and main, till a day comes when it has sucked the heart dry and it forcibly breaks through its bonds and departs. After that comes the misery of awakening, and then once again the longing to get back into the maze of the same mistakes.