The Kite Runner Key Quotes

The Kite Runner Key Quotes

1. Friendship and Brotherhood

   • "Lying awake in bed that night, I thought of Soraya Taheri's sickle-shaped birthmark, her gently hooked nose, and the way her luminous eyes had fleetingly held mine. My heart stuttered at the thought of her." This isn't the most angelic description of Soraya, yet it can be inferred that her birthmark subconsciously reminds Amir of Hassan which symbolises his love for him.
   • ""Friends?" Assef said, laughing. "You pathetic fool! Someday you'll wake up from your little fantasy and learn just how good of a friend he is." This could be an accurate interpretation of the pair's relationship which become especially profound considering Amir's failure to intervene. Nevertheless Amir still does nice things for Hassan and redeems himself by the novel's conclusion. Perhaps they aren't friends because they are brothers.
   • "But in none of his stories did Baba ever refer to Ali as his friend." Baba and Ali's friendship, mirros that of Amir and Hassan's on a number of levels. Firstly there is the same level of dominance and secondly both Baba and Amir betray Ali and Hassan.
   • "we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name." This quote highlights the priorities of the pair; Amir's being Baba and Hassan's being Amir, which could explain the events of the novel.
   • "Then he [Ali] would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break." This quote emphasizes the bond between the pair, as if they are actually brothers. The reader later finds out that the pair are brothers but it poses the question; what does Rahim Khan's revelation change?
   • "if I asked, really asked, he wouldn't deny me. Hassan never denied me anything." Hassan protects and defends Amir which foreshadows events later in the novel. It also appears that Amir controls the relationship and gets the two boys into trouble.
   • "For you, a thousand times over." this quote shows Hassan's devotion even after all of Amir's betrayals. It becomes very poigniant and a symbol of redemption after Amir's adoption of Sohrab.
   • "But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history, ethnicity, society, or religion was going to change that either. I spent most of the first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan. Sometimes, my entire childhood seems like one long lazy summer day with Hassan, chasing each other between tangles of trees in my father's yard, playing hide-and-seek, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, insect torture – with our crowning achievement undeniably the time we plucked the stinger off a bee and tied a string around the poor thing to yank it back every time it took flight." - Chapter 4

2. Betrayal

   • "But there was something fascinating – albeit in a sick way – about teasing Hassan. Kind of like when we used to play insect torture." Hossieni shows Amir to betray Hassan in lots of small ways which foreshadows his ultimate betrayal. He also shows Amir's cynicism in that he literally emotionally tortures Hassan.
     • "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." This counts as the ultimate betrayal by Amir, he sacrifices the safety of his friend for the sake of himself, despite Hassan's loyalty to Amir.
       • "I lifted Hassan's mattress and planted my new watch and a handful of Afghani bills under it." This compounds Amir's profound selfishness. He blatantly frames Hassan either to rid himself of the guilt he feels when he looks at Hassan, or to have Baba to himself.
         • "I'm thirty-eight years old and I've just found out my whole life is one big fucking lie! " This line occurs after Amir discovers the truth about Baba which clearly has a striking impact upon him. However this is the first time Amir discovers he wasnt the only one with secret guilt so perhaps it goes some way to ridding Amir of his conscience.
           • [Sohrab:] "You promised you'd never put me in one of those places, Amir agha," he said. His voice was breaking, tears pooling in his eyes" Amir yet again goes back on his words which has disastrous consequences with Sohrab's suicide attempt.
   • "That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years." - Chapter 1
   • "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
   • "In the end, I ran. I ran because I was a coward. I was afraid of Assef and what he would do to me… 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. 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
   • "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… I was that monster." - Chapter 8
   • "I flinched, like I’d been slapped… Then I understood: This was Hassan’s final sacrifice for me… And that led to another understanding: Hassan knew. He knew I’d seen everything in that alley, that I’d stood there and done nothing. He knew I had betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time." - Chapter 9
   • "I envied her. Her secret was out. Spoken. Dealt with. I opened my mouth and almost told her how I’d betrayed Hassan, lied, driven him out, and destroyed a forty-year relationship between Baba and Ali. But I didn’t." - Chapter 12

3. Violence and Rape

   • "Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended" This time would signal tp start of a still on-going struggle for power in Afghanistan. It is noticeable that the loss of Amir and Hassan's innocence, coincides with Afghanistan's loss of innocence.
     • "You couldn't trust anyone in Kabul any more – for a fee or under threat, people told on each other," Hosseini again uses the socio-political situation in Afganistan as a metaphor for the characters, in this case referring to the persistant betrayal in the novel.
       • "Karim tossed his cigarette and produced a handgun from his waist. Pointing it to the sky and making shooting gestures, he spat and cursed at the MiG." This is one of the many examples of David vs Goliath imagery throughout the novel, however David almost always wins e.g Amir returning home with Sohrab. Additionally the afghanis manage to stave off the Russians which could be seen as a real-life case.
   • "I stopped watching, turned away from the alley. Something warm was running down my wrist. I blinked, saw I was still biting down on my fist, hard enough to draw blood from the knuckles. I realized something else. I was weeping." - Chapter 7
   • "Grim reminders of it were strewn along the road: burned carcasses of old Soviet tanks, overturned military trucks gone to rust, a crushed Russian jeep that had plunged over the mountainside. The second war, I had watched on my TV screen. And now I was seeing it through Farid's eyes." - Chapter 20
   • "Jadeh Maywand had turned into a giant sand castle. The buildings that hadn't entirely collapsed barely stood, with caved in roofs and walls pierced with rockets shells. Entire blocks had been obliterated to rubble. I saw a bullet-pocked sign half buried at an angle in a heap of debris. It read DRINK COCA CO––. I saw children playing in the ruins of a windowless building amid jagged stumps of brick and stone. Bicycle riders and mule-drawn carts swerved around kids, stray dogs, and piles of debris. A haze of dust hovered over the city and, across the river, a single plume of smoke rose to the sky." - Chapter 20
   • "I saw a dead body near the restaurant. There had been a hanging. A young man dangled from the end of a rope tied to a beam, his face puffy and blue, the clothes he'd worn on the last day of his life shredded, bloody. Hardly anyone seemed to notice him." - Chapter 21 Now that he's accustomed his readers to the devastation of war in the previous chapter, he casually introduces a shocking image. We think most readers will pause here and say, "Gosh, this is really awful," and then move on because that's what Hosseini does. Hosseini knows his readers, like the Afghani citizens, are getting used to horror.