& strongly recommend!
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
- 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.
- He liked the enchanting sounds the Arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue. He said they comforted him, eased his heart. "You can summon them in your time of need, and they won't fail you. God's words will never betray you."
- 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.
- Behind every trail and every sorrow that he makes us shoulder, God has a reason.
- 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 women like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.
- Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person had to face non was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
- Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed, its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
- 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 footprintes would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.
- There would come a day in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly, not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would become to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion- like the phantom pain of an amputee.
- 'One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls'.
- Her eyes watered, her heart took flight. And she marveled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.
- 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. There, 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.
- She didn't dare. She didn't dare move a muscle. She didn't dare breathe, or blink even, for fear that she was nothing but a mirage shimmering in the distance, a brittle illusion that would vanish at the slightest provocation. Laila stood perfectly still and looked at Tariq until her chest screamed for air and her eyes burned to blink. And somehow, miraculously, after she took a breath, closed and opened her eyes, he was still standing there. Tariq was still standing there. Laila allowed herself to take a step toward him. Then another. And another. And then she was running.
- And yet she was leaving the wold 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, Mariam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.
Labels: A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
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