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"In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst."
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"One of the nicest things you can do to kick-start your children's day is to tell them honestly they look nice as they head out the door. This easy, five-second exchange says to your child: 'I see you; I notice you; I love you.'"

"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."

"Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child."

"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived lives of the parents."

"Most parents are not really 'supportive' because they want their kid(s) to succeed; they 'support' their kid(s) as an attempt to avoid appearing to have bred a failure, or, failures - in the eyes of their peers and/or neighbours."

"The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they've held their own peace?"

"Work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it."
Explore more quotes by Khaled Hosseini

"There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry."

"Hassan couldn't read a first-grade textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling but also sort of comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed."

"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."

"My books are love stories at core, really. But I am interested in manifestations of love beyond the traditional romantic notion. In fact, I seem not particularly inclined to write romantic love as a narrative motive or as an easy source of happiness for my characters."

"They rarely look at Baba -- the teenagers -- and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him."

"I know you're still young but I want you to understand and learn this now. Marriage can wait, education cannot. You're a very very bright girl. Truly you are. You can be anything you want Laila. I know this about you. And I also know that when this war is over Afghanistan is going to need you as much as its men maybe even more. Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated Laila. No chance."

"I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins."

"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."
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