A Thousand Splendid Suns Quotes

“Marriage can wait, education cannot.”

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”

“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”

“A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.”

“Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”

“A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.”

“Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”

“You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.”

“Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.”

“And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.”

“Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.”

“Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.”

“Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. *As a reminder of how people like us suffer,* she’d said. *How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.*”

“The Chinese say it’s better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.”

“But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.”

“She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.”

“Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”

“Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”

“‘I’m sorry,’ Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.”

“A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.”

“You can not stop you from being who you are.”