1. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that
falls upon us.”
“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.”
“Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled
and crashed, swelled and crashed.”(page 130)
pg 370, 323 physically enduring, 300, 292, 256, 187, 99, 68, 63
Khaled Hosseini illustrates the battle of endurance as the central theme through
the most oppressed and defeated character, Mariam, in his novel A Thousand Splendid
Suns. Mariam’s character evoked sympathy from the very beginning when her life story
as a “harami” was laid before readers. The novel revolves around the words Mariam’s
mother muttered to her when she inquired Nana about going to school: “It’s our lot in
life, Mariam. Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have” (19). The idea of enduring
circled the novel through the influence of Afghan culture and the constant uprising the
country faced during this particular time period.
The dread and agony the characters faced in A Thousand Splendid Suns appeared
as a show of endurance-- not only physically, but also emotionally. Hosseini addresses
Mariam as a young girl, torn from the one person she had in life, leaving her to take
blame for the incidents that occurred. After her father, Jalil Khan, signed Mariam over
into the hands of Rasheed, the life she dreamed of washed away and faded into depths
she would never reach. While living in her new home, Rasheed’s home, Mariam searches
for the hope she needed to continue on but “she had never in her life felt so alone” (68).
For Mariam knew this marriage never occurred in the way she imagined her life to pan
out, so she struggled to find the hope necessary to push through her day to day life.
Nana’s words act as a constant—as if her words are the only solitude and certainty
Mariam has in her life. Suffering from the heartache of losing her first child, the one
being she felt connected with, who gave her a purpose in life was stripped away from her
in the blink of an eye. Puzzled with the unfortunate happenstance of her own life, Mariam
recalls the words Nana had once shared with her as she watched the snow fall.
“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 women like us suffer, she’d said. How
quietly we endure all that falls upon us” (91).
This quote defends yet another way Nana’s words would serve as hope and
encouragement for the struggle laid before Mariam in her days to come. Mariam’s battle
of coping with defeat and sorrow showed no end in sight. In the days after the first

2. miscarriage, “there had been six more cycles of hopes raised then dashed, each loss, each
collapse, each trip to the doctor more crushing for Mariam than the last” (99). The
hardest and most daunting of tasks Mariam faced throughout her life unarguably dealt
with the search for hope after the loss of so many children. Mariam yearned for a child, a
being, that would bring her hope and happiness—a promise that better days were to
come. However, the lingering sadness and depression left Mariam questioning her
purpose in life, and if enduring the sorrow would ever lead to some kind of happiness.