About clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

— Khaled Hosseini

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

— Khaled Hosseini

A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand...well, God put a lot of thought in making you.

— Khaled Hosseini

And every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

— Khaled Hosseini

And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another... Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

— Khaled Hosseini

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

— Khaled Hosseini

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.

— Khaled Hosseini

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.

— Khaled Hosseini

And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had love and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence of last.

— Khaled Hosseini

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

— Khaled Hosseini