Quotes for the practise Essay – Kite Runner

‘it was my past of unatoned sins.’ (Amir)

‘Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands’. (Amir about Baba)

‘My father molded the world around him to his liking’ (Amir)

‘Baba saw the world in black and white’ (Amir)

‘I always felt like Baba hated me a little…I had killed his beloved wife…But I hadn’t turned out like him. Not at all.’ (Amir)

"You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing them too. Maybe even hating them a little."(Amir about Baba)

‘sometimes you are the most self-centered man I know.’ (Rahim Khan to Baba)

‘There is something missing in that boy…’ (Baba about Amir)

‘If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son.’ (Baba about Amir)

‘…there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every sin is a variation of theft.’ (Baba)

‘When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness’ (Baba)

‘It hurts to say that. But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.” (Baba)

‘what I feared most: guileless devotion.’ (Amir)

‘Hassan did nothing as I pelted him again and again…’ (Amir)

‘He knew I had betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again…’ (Amir about Hassan)

‘I was the snake in the grass, the monster in the lake. I wasn’t worthy of this sacrifice; I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief.’ (Amir)

‘In the end, the world always wins.’ (Rahim Khan)

‘a boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.’ (Baba)

‘that good, real good, was born out of your father’s remorse.’ (Rahim Khan)

‘it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir Jan, when guilt leads to good.” (Rahim Khan)

(About Hassan’s photo) ‘the man in the chapan exuded a sense of self-assuredness, of ease.’ (Amir)

‘…fifteen years after I’d buried him, I was learning that 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 honor.’ (Amir)

‘Like father, like son’ (Amir)

‘how was I going to reconcile this new image of Baba with the one that had been imprinted on my mind for so long…’ (Amir about Baba)

‘my entire life…had been a cycle of lies, betrayals, and secrets.’ (Amir)

‘Hassan had loved me once, loved me in a way that no one ever had or ever would again.’ (Amir)

‘…your father was a man torn between two halves, Amir jan: you and Hassan. He loved you both, but he could not love Hassan the way he longed to, openly, and as a father. SO, he took it out on you instead – Amir, the socially legitimate half, the half that represented the riches he had inherited and the sin-with-impunity privileges that came with them. When he saw you, he saw himself. And his guilt…when your father was hard on you, he was also being hard on himself.’ (Rahim Khan’s letter to Amir)

‘…good, real good, was born out of your father’s remorse.’ (Rahim Khan – letter)

‘And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.’ (Letter to Amir)

‘As it turned out, 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.’ (Amir)

‘Rahim Khan had summoned me here to atone not just for my sins but for Baba’s too’ (Amir)

‘Your father, like you, was a tortured soul, Rahim Khan had written. We had both sinned and betrayed. But Baba had found a way to create good out of his remorse. What I had done, other than take my guilt out on the very same people I had betrayed, and then try to forget it all?’ (Amir)

‘Father used to say it’s wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don’t know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.’ (Sohrab)

‘I think he loved us equally but differently.’(Amir about Baba)

‘I think he was ashamed of himself.’ (Amir about Baba)

‘I see now that Baba was wrong, there is a God, there has always been.’ (Amir)

‘Your father was a man torn between two halves.’ (Rahim Khan)

‘I had been the entitled half, the society-approved, legitimate half, the unwitting embodiment of Baba’s guilt. I looked at Hassan, showing those two missing front teeth, sunlight slanting on his face. Baba’s other half. The entitled, unprivileged half. The half who had inherited what had been pure and noble in Baba. The half that, maybe, in the most secret recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son.’ (Amir)

‘Soraya and I became involved in Afghan projects, as much out of a sense of civil duty as the need for something – anything – to fill the silence upstairs, the silence that sucked everything in like a black hole.’ (Amir)

‘I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But I didn’t care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips…I ran.’ (Amir)