A Thousand Splendid Sun Quotes
A Thousand Splendid Sun was written by Khaled Hosseini and was recognized as his well known book that was published. Hosseini is widely popular because of his written fiction that are all based from the war in Afghanistan. The story of this book highlights how women have been through such difficult times in Afghanistan. The story began from 1960 until 2005, drawing major references from the actual event that took place in the said period.
Reading from the countless reviews posted online about the book, most readers have described that the story is sad because of so many heartbreaking events that happened to women in Afghanistan. But it is also being said that there’s more than that in situations that you must look forward to reading. Plus, it will literally make you cry and feel sympathy for womens being through.
The book talks about the relationship of Laila and Mariam and how they took the courage to stay strong living in such an unfair world. It sends out the message to everyone that even they seem to experience life as challenging and very struggling but they should never forget to believe that love and compassion can always do miracles if they will continue to radiate it inside their hearts. And whenever you make sacrifices for love, it doesn’t really much like the feeling of giving sacrifice but it is much like a choice, a decision making.
Here are the fifty listed quotes from the book of A Thousand Splendid Sun for you to have an insight of the story.
- “Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”
- “A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated.”
- “I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!”
- “She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies, and sometimes not.”
- “A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver.”
- “In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory,what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could-a look, a whisper, a moan-to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires,and she couldn’t, in the end, save it all.”
- “She thought of Aziza’s stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.”
- “She did not know what this word harami—bastard—meant. Nor was she old enough to appreciate the injustice, to see that it is the creators of the harami who are culpable, not the harami, whose only sin is being born.”
- “Inside Laila too a battle was being waged : guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never see each other again.”
- “She would grab whatever she could -a look , a whisper , a moan – to salvage from perishing , to perserve. But time is most unforgivving of fires , and she couldn’t , in the end , save it all.”
- “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.”
- “Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person has to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
- “She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.”
- “Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”—Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn’t understand. She didn’t understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can’t breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”—Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- ” But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Mariam always held her breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that she didn’t breathe God would grant her another day with Jalil.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she’d said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.”—Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn’t bypass you, Laila.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “Marriage can wait, education cannot.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “I will follow you to the ends of the world.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “I’ll die if you go. The Jinn will come, and I’ll have one of my fits. You’ll see, I’ll swallow my tongue and die. Don’t leave me, Mariam jo. Please stay. I’ll die if you go.” —Khaled Hosseini, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”
- “It was Mullah Faizullah who had taught Mariam to read, who had patiently looked over her shoulder as her lips worked the words soundlessly, her index finger lingering beneath each word, pressing until the nail bed went white, as though she could squeeze the meaning out of the symbols.”
- “Laila lay there and listened, wishing Mammy would notice that she, Laila, hadn’t become shaheed, that she was alive, here, in bed with her, that she had hopes and a future. But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers’ past. They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death. Mammy was now the curator of their lives’ museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor. A receptacle for their myths. The parchment on which Mammy meant to ink their legends.”
- ” Seasons had come and gone; presidents in Kabul had been inaugurated and murdered; an empire had been defeated; old wars had ended and new ones had broken out. But Mariam had hardly noticed, hardly cared. She had passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.”
- “When the summer winds blew, she watched bits of scrap paper ride the currents in a frenzied, corkscrew motion, as they were hurled this way and that, high above the prison walls. She watched the winds stir mutiny in the dust, whipping it into violent spirals that ripped through the courtyard. Everyone—the guards, the inmates, the children, Mariam—burrowed their faces in the hook of their elbows, but the dust would not be denied. It made homes of ear canals and nostrils, of eyelashes and skin folds, of the space between molars. Only at dusk did the winds die down. And then if a night breeze blew, it did so timidly, as if to atone for the excesses of its daytime sibling.”
- “You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.”
- “Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”
- “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.”
- “You can not stop you from being who you are.”
- “Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”
- “A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.”
- “One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
- “A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.”
- “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.” – Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- “Miriam 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. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings.” – Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- “she is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.” – Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- “You changed the subject.”
“From what?”
“The empty-headed girls who think you’re sexy.”
“You know.”
“Know what?”
“That I only have eyes for you.” – Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- “Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.” – Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- “yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling herois.” – Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- ” Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. “For you,” he said. “I’d kill with it for you, Laila.” – Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
- “Each snowflake was a sigh heard by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. All the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women suffer.” – Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
What makes Hosseini’s written works such an amazing masterpiece is that he was able to put emphasis on the effects of war on the life of the characters. Moreover , he also described in this book what were the situations of Afghanistan back then when Soviets invaded and conquered the country. When the time how Babrak Karmal formed a type of puppet government in the country and how the Taliban able to take control of the country brought a lot of misfortune and suffering to the people of Afghanistan. All series of these events are accurately being described in the form of fictional written work. The story both contains the drama with some truth revealed in it. That is being said why this story makes a page turner for readers.
Moreover, the title of this novel also shows the truthful essence of the life behind the women’s survival during such a very difficult crisis of their lives. Despite the sadness they’ve been through and the challenging times they’ve been facing, the two main focus characters were still able to see the situation with a silver lining and lend a hand towards each other.
Truly, the book of A Thousand Splendid Suns is so inspiring and splendid to read. The whole story is filled with so many strong emotions that will definitely touch a person’s heart whenever reading it and with a very stimulating plot. A life lesson for every woman to always take the courage to fight and support one another no matter what heavy the situations are.