« Once upon a time, in the days when divs and jinns and
giants roamed the land, there lived a farmer named Baba Ayub. »
« Qais, who was three years old. Qais was a little boy
with dark blue eyes. He charmed anyone who met him with his devilish
laughter. »
« The sleepwalking stopped after a time, but Qais grew
attached to the bell and refused to part with it. »
« A finger had to bec ut, to save the hand. »
«Have you ? it said in a voice thick as thunder. »
« I must say your courage rouses in me a surge of
admiration. »
« The div pulled the curtains open. Behind it was a
glass window. Through the window, Baba Ayub looked down on an enormous garden.
Lines of cypress trees bordered the garden, the ground at their base filled
with flowers of all colors. There were pools made of bluet iles, and marble
terraces, and lush green lawns. Baba Ayub saw beautifully sculpted hedges and
water fountains gurgling in the shade of pomegranate trees. In three lifetimes
he could not have imagined a place so beautiful. »
« Someday, when he is a man, hem ay choose to leave,
and he shall be free to do so. I suspect he will touch many lives with his
kindness and bring happiness to those trapped in sorrow. »
« When you have lived as long as I have, the div
replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same
color. Have you made your choice ? »
« From the bed of the wagon, Pari’s hand quickly
slipped into Abdullah’s. She was looking up at him, her eyes liquid, and she
was smiling her gap-toothed smile like no bad thing would ever befall her so
long as he stood at her side. He closed his fingers around her hand, he way he
did each night when he and his little sister slept in their cot, their skulls
touching, their legs tangled. »
« They traded furtive happy glances, brother and
sister, but saud little for fear of souring Father’s mood and spoiling their
good fortune. »
« Inside the box were all of the feathers that Pari
collected. They were her most cherished belongings. »
« It was for Pari that Shuja lost all composure. His
love for her was vast and unclouded. She was his universe. »
« The oak towered over everything in Shadbagh and was
the oldest living thing in the village. »
« This was his purpose, he believed, the reason God had
made him, so he would be there to take care of Pari when He took away their
mother. »
« Everything in the room was polished, free of dust.
Abdullah had never in his life been so conscious of his own dirtiness. »
« If Masooma glanced in their direction, they looked
idiotically privileged. They imagined they had shared a moment with her. She
interrupted conversations midsentence, smokers mid-drag. She was the trembler
of knees, the spiller of teacups. »
« A story is like a moving train : no matter where
you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or
later. »
« Not that it absolves me, but I was a young man, Mr.
Markos, eager to take on the world, full of dreams, modest and vague as they
may have been, and I pictured my youth ebbing away, my prospects increasingly
truncated. So I left. To help provide for my sisters, yes, that is true. But
also to escape. »
« I was dying a thousand deaths inside. »
« But one thing he always told us was this : that
if you look at any Muslim’s palm, no matter where in the world, you will see
something quite astonishing. They all have the same lines. Meaning what ?
Meaning that the lines on a Muslim’s left hand make the Arabic number
eighty-one, and the ones on the right the number eighteen. Substract eighteen
from eighty-one and what do you get ? You get sixty-three. The Prophet’s
age when he died, peace be upon him. »
« I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps
more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me. »
« She usually did most of the talking, which suited me
well ; I was happy enough to be the vessel into which she poured her
stories. »
« And she’s been given the perfect name : Pari.
She is indeed as beauiful as a fairy. »
« He had all the furniture in Pari’s room painted
yellow since he had discovered this was her favorite color. »
« He offered to accompany her to the hospital, but in a
perfunctory way. It was a mere formality. »
« She does remember Julien saying, ‘Pari-like the
city ?’ And from Maman the familiar reply, ‘No, without the s. It means
‘fairy’ in Farsi. »
« For instance, in Provence two yers earlier when Pari
had seen a massive oak tree outisde a farmhouse. Another time at the Jardin des
Tuileries when she had watched a young mother pull her son in a little red
Radio Flyer Wagon. Pari didn’t understand. She read a story once about a
middle-aged Turkish man who had suddenly slipped into a deep depression when
the twin brother he never knew existed had suffered a fatal heart attack while
on a canoe excursion in the Amazon rain forest. It was the closest anyone had
ever come to articulating what she felt. »
« Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people,
turning them into unwilling participants. You steal their desires, their
dreams, pocket thei flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to
you. You do this knowingly. »
« By the time the Berlin Wall comes down so have the
walls in her academic life, and she has slowly won over most of her colleagues
with her sensible demeanor and disarming sociability. »
« the Aegean, blue and calm in the summer morning,
white-capped in the afternoon when the meltemi winds blew in from the
north. »
« Madaline was one of those people to whom elegance
came effortlessly as though it were a genetic skill, like the ability to curl
your tongue into the shape of a tube. With Madaline, there was never a lull in
the conversation ; stories just trilled out of her. One morning she told
us about her travels – to Ankara, for instance, where she had strolled the
banks of theEnguri Su and sipped green tea laced with raki, or the time she and
Mr. Gianakos had gone to Kenya and ridden the backs of elephants among thorny
acacias and even sat down to eat cornmeal mush and coconut rice with the local
villagers. »
« Madaline said that in Ankara she had gone to a place
called Kugulu Park and watched swans gliding in the water. She said the water
was dazzling. »
« Thalia and I were upstairs, playing a game of
tavli »
« Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given rndomly,
stupidly. »
« If I’ve learned anything in Kabul, it is that human
behaviour is messy and unpredicable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.
But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life
taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and
affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this
story. »
« He said that if culture was a house, then language
was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said you
ended up wayward, without a proper home or legitimate identity. »
« she has summoned her lost brother with this magic
chant like a genie in a fairy tale. »
« Being alone with her on those weekend getaways was
like curling up into a soft cloud. »
« Another nursery rhyme. This one about the bridge in
Avignon. »
« It strikes the gray-metal-colored Rhône broadside and
breaks on its surface into little shards of brightness. ‘Every French child
knows this song.’ »
And the Mountains Echoed – Khaled Hosseini
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