For You a Thousand Times Over…

I just finished reading “The Kite Runner”. All I can say about this book is it is just very beautifully written, amazing, the story, the style everything. I remember having watery eyes and holding back my tears while reading it. I hadn’t been reading books for a while as I was quite busy at school and then I started this book last week but it didn’t even take me a week to finish it. I was getting more and more curious on every single page I was reading. With this book, I, once more, remembered how disgusting, inhumane wars, violence and some people are…

Very highly recommended to those who love reading heart-wrenching stories!!

“He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ”For you a thousand times over!” he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.”

“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft… When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”

“There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.”

“It’s wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don’t know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.”

“I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He’d carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he’d pull for us from the tandoor’s roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.”

“One day, maybe around 1983 or 1984, I was at a video store in Fremont. I was standing in the Westerns section when a guy next to me, sipping Coke from a 7-Eleven cup, pointed to The Magnificent Seven and asked me if I had seen it. “Yes, thirteen times,” I said. “Charles Bronson dies in it, so do James Coburn and Robert Vaughn.” He gave me a pinch-faced look, as if I had just spat in his soda. “Thanks a lot, man,” he said, shaking his head and muttering something as he walked away. That was when I learned that, in America, you don’t reveal the ending of the movie, and if you do, you will be scorned and made to apologize profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.
In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered. When Hassan and I came home after watching a Hindi film at Cinema Zainab, what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba, or the myriad of Baba’s friends—second and third cousins milling in and out of the house—wanted to know was this: Did the Girl in the film find happiness? Did the bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become kamyab and fulfill his dreams, or was he nah-kam, doomed to wallow in failure?
Was there happiness at the end, they wanted to know.”

“And one more thing, General Sahib,” I said. “You will never again refer to him as ‘Hazara boy’ in my presence. He has a name and it’s Sohrab.”

-Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner…