Thousand Splendid Suns Quote ID

"People...shouldn't be allowed to have new children if they'd already given away all their love to their old ones."

Laila

"They didn't make a show of friendship...Boys treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly."

Laila

"I used to worship you . . . On Thursdays, I sat for hours waiting for you . . . I thought about you all the time . . . I didn't know you were ashamed of me."

Mariam

"A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you."

Nana

"Like a compass needle that always points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam"

Nana

"Now you know what your rice tastes like. Now you know what you've given me in this marriage. Bad food, and nothing else"

Rasheed

"That's one thing I can't stand . . . the sound of a woman crying. I'm sorry. I have no patience for it."

Rasheed

"I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks, 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 stepping on my heart..."

Fariba

"That he is not...You will not liken that one-legged carpenter's boy to your brothers. There is no one like your brothers."

Fariba

"...I wanted you to see your country's heritage...to learn of its rich past...some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel."

Hakim

"A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated."

Hakim

"All day, this poem about Kabul has been bouncing around in my head. Saib-e-Tabrizi wrote it back in the seventeenth century, I think...all I can remember now is two lines: ""One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs/Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."

Hakim

"Women have always had it hard in this country...but they're probably more free now, under the communists, and have more rights than they have ever had before."

Hakim

"Did you know that if you fling snot in Siberia, it's a green icicle before it hits the ground?"

Tariq

"For you...I'd kill with it for you, Laila."

Tariq