Friday 17 May 2013

Quotations to Guide Your Reading


Quotations to Guide Your Reading

Chapter 10

Do you always have to be the hero?  I thought, my heart fluttering.  Can’t you just let it go for once?  But I knew he couldn’t—it wasn’t in his nature” (122).

“I remember Baba climbed halfway up the ladder, hopped back down and fished the snuffbox from his pocket.  He emptied the box and picked up a handful of dirt from the middle of the unpaved road.  He kissed the dirt.  Poured it into the box.  Stowed the box in his breast pocket, next to his heart” (128).

Chapter 11

“I reached across the table and put my hand on his.  My student hand, clean and soft, on his laborer’s hand, grubby and calloused.  I thought of all the trucks, train sets, and bikes he’s bought me in Kabul.  Now America.  One last gift for Amir” (137).

“‘It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir’” (150).

Chapter 12

“And she would bear the brunt of that poison, not me--I was fully aware of the Afghan double standard that favoured by gender” (155).

“‘What’s going to happen to you, you say?  All these years, that’s what I’ve been trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question” (165).

Chapter 13

“Baba had wrestled bears his whole life.  Losing his young wife.  Raising a son by himself.  Leaving his beloved homeland, his watan.  Poverty. Indignity.  In the end, a bear had come that he couldn’t best.  But even then, he had lost on his own terms” (183).


Chapter 14

Come. There is a way to be good again” (202).

Chapter 15

No quotations.

Chapter 16

Note:  Rahim Khan is narrating.

“He said it was a matter of ihtiram,a matter of respect.  He Farzana moved their things into the hut in the backyard, where he was born” (219).

Chapter 17

Note:  Amir is narrating again.

“Looking at the photo, one might have concluded that this was a man who thought the world had been good to him” (227).

“‘It isn’t about money, Amir!’ Rahim Khan roared. ‘I’m a dying man and I will not be insulted!  It has never been about money with me, you know that.  And why you? I think we both know why it has to be you’” (233).

Chapter 18

“...Baba had been a thief.  And a thief of the worst kind, because the things he’d stolen had been sacred: from me the right to know I had a brother, from Hassan his identity, and from Ali his honour.  His nang.  His namoos” (237).

Chapter 19

“’That’s the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib.  That’s the Afghanistan I know.  You?  You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it” (245).

“I follow the barrel on its upward arc.  I see the face behind the plume of smoke swirling from the muzzle.  I am the man in the herringbone vest” (252).

“Earlier that morning, when I was certain no one was looking, I did something I had done twenty-six years earlier:  I planted a fistful of crumpled money under a mattress” (254).

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