Khaled Hosseini

Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky.

The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born

The end, the official end, would come first in April 1978 with the communist coup d’état, and then in December 1979, when Russian tanks would roll into the very same streets where Hassan and I played, bringing the death of the Afghanistan I knew and marking the start of a still ongoing era of bloodletting.

He’d referred to Assef as “Agha,” and I wondered briefly what it must be like to live with such an ingrained sense of one’s place in a hierarchy.

The constitutional monarchy had been abolished, replaced by a republic, led by a president of the republic.

beget Baba’s sympathy

loved wintertime in Kabul. I loved it for the soft pattering of snow against my window at night, for the way fresh snow crunched under my black rubber boots, for the warmth of the cast-iron stove as the wind screeched through the yards

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

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

shirked the austere