Qoutes Flashcards
Baba says to Rahim Khan
“A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything
Amir
I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right: Nothing was free in this world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba.
Narrator Amir
Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words
Hassan sends these words in a letter to Amir
I dream that someday you will return to Kabul and revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.
Amir is beginning to become consumed by guilt over what he did to Hassan.
I thought about Hassan’s dream, the one about us swimming in the lake. There is no monster, he’d said, just water. Except he’d been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster
The words said by Rahim Khan to Amir
There is a way to be good again, he’d said. A way to end the cycle. With a little boy. An orphan. Hassan’s son. Somewhere in Kabul.
Hassan to Amir on a letter.
I dream that someday you will return to Kabul and revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.
Amir when Assef is raping Hassan
“I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan—the way he’d stood up for me all those times in the past—and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run. In the end, I ran.”
Amir has just learned that Baba had betrayed Ali
“Baba and I were more alike than I’d ever known. We had both betrayed the people who would have given their lives for us. And with that came this realisation: that Rahim Khan had summoned me here to atone not just for my sins but for Baba’s too.”
Social worker to Amir when he is trying to save Sohrab
“I could have run like everyone else. But I didn’t. I stayed. I stayed because of them.’ He pointed to the door. ‘If I deny him one child, he takes ten. So I let him take one and leave the judging to Allah. I swallow my pride and take his goddamn filthy … dirty money. Then I go to the bazaar and buy food for the children.’
Hassan to Amir running after the kite
‘For you, a thousand times over!’
Amir wants to win kite comet for his father
“All I saw was the blue kite. All I smelled was victory. Salvation. Redemption.”
By Amir when he meets Assef as he tries to find Sohrab
“My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.” (p. 289)
Rahim khan to Amir
‘Rahim, a boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.’ I wonder, is that what you’ve become?”
Rahim to Baba(talking about Amir)
“Children aren’t colouring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favourite colours.”
