Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. In 1970 Hosseini and his family moved to Iran where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan in Tehran. In 1973 Hosseini’s family returned to Kabul, and Hosseini’s youngest brother was born in July of that year. In 1976, when Hosseini was 11 years old, Hosseini’s father obtained a job in Paris, France, and moved the family there.
They were unable to return to Afghanistan because of the Saur Revolution in which the PDPA communist party seized power through a bloody coup in April 1978. Instead, a year after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California.
Hosseini graduated from Independence High School in San Jose in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. in 1993. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1996.
He practiced medicine for over ten years, until a year and a half after the release of The Kite Runner. Hosseini is currently a Goodwill Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He has been working to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan through the Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The concept for the foundation was inspired by the trip to Afghanistan that Hosseini made in 2007 with UNHCR. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Roya, and their two children (Harris and Farah).
Khaled Hosseini Quotes
But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
For you, a thousand times over
It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.
There is only one sin. and that is theft… when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
Marriage can wait, education cannot.
it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.
Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.
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.
There is a way to be good again.
People say that eyes are windows to the soul.
Time can be a greedy thing-sometimes it steals the details for itself.
I will follow you to the ends of the world.
A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
You are the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.
Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
In the end, the world always wins. That’s just the way of things.
Some stories don’t need telling
A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.
You’ve always been a tourist here. You just didn’t know it.
All good things in life are fragile and easily lost.
The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.
Life is a train, get on board.
Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.
The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.
Blood is a powerful thing.
Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.
You can not stop you from being who you are.
But then it passed, as all things do.
People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.
Regret… when it comes to you, I have oceans of it.
A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver.
True redemption is…when guilt leads to good.
Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
You have to do it now. If you wait until morning, you’ll lose.
This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.
Sometimes a finger must be cut to save the hand.
People learned to live with the most unimaginable things.