Katie Dale Quotes

“Mum bought me �kite for my sixth birthday. It was beautiful. Snowy white with � long tail of ribbons. Sheheld the string, and I� ran and ran as fast as I �could, but it kept dropping to� clumsy heap on the ground. When� I gottired Mum took over, holding it high above her head and running and running until, all at once, �sudden wonderful gust of wind took the kite soaring high, high into the sky, so� I had to squint to see it.“Hold on, Rosie!” Mum had called. “Hold tight!” And �I did, gripping the string with all my might as the kite danced high up above, gleaming bright whiteagainst the blue sky, its ribbons sparkling in the sunlight as it flew, soaring and dipping like �bird, forever pulling at the string in my hand —higher, higher — tugging to getfree. Then� I let go.The string snapped from my grip and was gone. Mum raced after it,but it was too fast,soaring up,up and away, higher than the trees. She scooped me up in �hug and told me it was all right, she'd buy me another one. But� I didn't want another one. That was my kite,andit was free. I’d let it go.It’d wanted so much to be free that I just couldn't hold on, couldn’t hold it down.� I smiled as I� watched it whirl away — above the trees, above the birds, above the clouds, sparkling into the heavens, dancing free. It was the most beautiful thing I �have ever seen.”

“Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper-thin slice of intersection between those spheres.”

“I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land... it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistanhumming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me either. I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San FranciscoChronicle. Somewhere over those mountains in the west slept the city where my harelipped brother and I had run kites. Somewhere over there, the blindfolded man from my dream had died a needless death. Once, over those mountains, I had made a choice. And now, a quarter of a century later, that choice had landed me right back on this soil.”

“Someone once told me that children are like kites. You struggle just to get them in the air; they crash; you add a longer tail. Then they get caught in a tree; you climb up and bring them down, and untangle the string; you run to get them aloft again. Finally, the kite is airborne, and it flies higher and higher, as you let out more string, until it's so high in the sky, it looks like a bird. And if the string snaps, and you've done your job right, the kite will continue to soar in the wind, all by itself.”

“Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.”

“The moment when kite becomes free, it will fall down!”

“A kite only flies if it’s tethered.”

“We are kites in this world God is holding the string.”

“...you think so logically...like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically...like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth...”

“A Kite in the Wind - with Love , Truth and Honesty - weathered A Wilderness of Voices, Through the Darkness, With Love”