The Kite Runner Key Quotes II

The Kite Runner Key Quotes II

1. Innocence

   • "We hurled pebbles at their goats." Despite the playful innocence, this does imply that the boys have an ingrained sense of violence that will foreshadow events later in the novel.
     • "I felt like a soldier trying to sleep in the trenches the night before a major battle. And that wasn't so far off. In Kabul, fighting kites was a little like going to war. " Hosseini constantly makes reference to War even in the most innocent of circumstances.
       • "Assef knelt behind Hassan, put his hands on Hassan's hips and lifted his bare buttocks." This is the scene in which both Hassan and Amir's innocence is stolen, but arguably Assef is also innocent as he is also only a child at this time.

2. Redemption

   • "I was going to win, and I was going to run that last kite. Then I’d bring it home and show it to Baba. Show him once and for all that his son was worthy." - Chapter 6
   • "Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I has to slay, to win Baba." - Chapter 7
   • "Listening to them, I realized how much of who I was, what I was, had been defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people’s lives… Now he was gone. Baba couldn’t show me the way anymore; I’d have to find it on my own." - Chapter 13
   • "Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone just before hanging up." - Chapter 14
   • "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. And with that came this realization: that Rahim Khan had summoned me here to atone not just for my sins but for Baba’s too." - Chapter 18
   • "Another rib snapped, this time lower. What was so funny was that, for the first time since the winter of 1975, I felt at peace. I laughed because I saw that, in some hidden nook in the corner of my mind, I’d even been looking forward to this… My body was broken – just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later – but I felt healed." - Chapter 22
   • "I loved him because he was my friend, but also because he was a good man, maybe even a great man. And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father’s remorse. Sometimes, I think everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good." - Chapter 23
   • "It was only a smile, nothing more… A tiny thing… But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting." - Chapter 25
   • "The half that, maybe, in the most secret recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son… Then I realized something: That last thought had brought no sting with it… I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night." - Chapter 25

3. Politics and Society

   • "The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either… Never mind that we spent entire winters flying kites, running kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame… a boy with Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of these things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was ever going to change that." - Chapter 4
   • "Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba. Was it a fair price? The answer floated to my conscious mind before I could thwart it: He was just a Hazara, wasn’t he?" - Chapter 7
   • “But before you sacrifice yourself for him, think about this: Would he do the same for you? Have you ever wondered why he never includes you in games when he has guests? Why he only plays with you when no one else is around? I’ll tell you why, Hazara. Because to him, you’re nothing but an ugly pet…” “Amir agha and I are friends,” Hassan said." - Chapter 7
   • "In the morning, Jalaluddin… would probably think we’d gone out for a stroll or a drive. We hadn’t told him. You couldn’t trust anyone in Kabul anymore – for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend." - Chapter 10
   • "Long before the Roussi army marched into Afghanistan, long before villages were burned and schools destroyed… Kabul had become a city of ghosts for me. A city of harelipped ghosts." - Chapter 11
   • "“The war is over, Hassan,” I said. “There’s going to be peace, Inshallah, and happiness and calm. No more rockets, no more killing, no more funerals!” But he just turned off the radio and asked if he could get me anything before he went to bed. A few weeks later, the Taliban banned kite fighting. And two years later, in 1998, they massacred the Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif." - Chapter 16
   • "He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path, a large burlap sack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. “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.”" - Chapter 19

4. Family (Father/Son relationships)

   • Amir/Baba
     • "Because the truth of it was, I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn’t I? The least I could have done was to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn’t turned out like him." - Chapter 3
     • “And where is he headed?” Baba said. “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”" - Chapter 3
     • "I was going to win, and I was going to run that last kite. Then I’d bring it home and show it to Baba. Show him once and for all that his son was worthy." - Chapter 6
     • "Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba. Was it a fair price? " - Chapter 7
     • "As I drove, I wondered why I was different. Maybe it was because I had been raised by men; I hadn’t grown up around women and had never been exposed firsthand to the double standard with which Afghan society sometimes treated them…" - Chapter 13
     • "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. And with that came this realization: that Rahim Khan had summoned me here to atone not just for my sins but for Baba’s too." - Chapter 18
     • "Your father, like you, was a tortured soul, Rahim Khan had written. Maybe so. We had both sinned and betrayed." - Chapter 23
     • "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." - Chapter
     • ""Remember this," Baba said, pointing at me, "The man is a Pashtun to the root. He has nang and namoos." Nang. Namoos. Honor and pride. The tenets of Pashtun men. Especially when it came to the chastity of a wife. Or a daughter." - Chapter 12
   • Amir/Sohrab
   • Ali/Hassan
     • "Hassan's father, Ali, used to catch us and get mad, or as mad as someone as gentle as Ali could ever get. He would wag his finger and wave us down from the tree. He would take the mirror and tell us what his mother had told him, that the devil shone mirrors too, shone them to distract Muslims during prayer. "And he laughs while he does it," he always added, scowling at his son. "Yes, Father," Hassan would mumble, looking down at his feet. But he never told on me. Never told that the mirror, like shooting walnuts at the neighbour's dog, was always my idea." - Chapter 2
   • Baba/Hassan
   • Hassan/Sohrab