Quotes from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“Life is too short to be lived badly.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn't comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“You are putting yourself in serious danger...'

I think that I preferred to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for me. The shame of having become a mediocre nihilist.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“Culture and education are the lethal weapons against all kinds of fundamentalism.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“Prosperity consists of two things: tea after a meal, and a cigarette after tea.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“Is religion defending our physical integrity or is it just opposed to fashion?”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“I'm happy to see you so well-settled here. Now you must make an effort, you must become somebody. I don't care what you do later, only try to be the best. Even if you become a cabaret dance, better that you dance at the lido than in a hole in the wall.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“Night fell... "Night brings good counsel", my grandmother always told me.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else's rules.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“I wanted to die. Where were my parents to take me in their arms, to reassure me?”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“What do you want me to say, sir? That I'm the vegetable that I refused to become, that I'm so disappointed in myself that I can no longee look at myself in the mirror? That I hate myself?”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“Third: live together as long as you feel truly happy. Life is too short to be lived badly.”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“In retrospect, I can see that I had always known that it wouldn't between us. But after my pitiful love story in Vienna, I needed to believe in someone again...”
― Marjane Satrapi, quote from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

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Popular quotes

“I might have taken a little more time, I might have allowed myself a longer goodbye.. soaking up every little detail until the memory was firmly lodged in my mind forever. But that's not how it works is it? And maybe it's better that way. Because some things are never meant to be anything more than a moment. And that was one of them." -Cait”
― Kevin Brooks, quote from Lucas

“A party at which the guests are all of the beautiful persuasion tends to be dull indeed, as they have no conversation that does not pertain to themselves. A successful gathering requires a number of the ill-favored but clever. The beautiful are but ornaments—desirable, but dispensable.”
― Diana Gabaldon, quote from Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade

“শক্তির দুটো অংশ আছে — এক অংশ ব্যক্ত আর-এক অংশ অব্যক্ত, এক অংশ উদ্যোগ আর-এক অংশ বিশ্রাম, এক অংশ প্রয়োগ আর-এক অংশ সংবরণ — শক্তির এই সামঞ্জস্য যদি নষ্ট করে তাহলে সে ক্ষুব্ধ হয়ে ওঠে, কিন্তু সে ক্ষোভ মঙ্গলকর নয়।”
― Rabindranath Tagore, quote from Gora

“In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life.
Nowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no other against which human advancement could be tested.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.
They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.
It is impossible to understand what minds of that age—the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind—were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers—dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past. And—oh.
Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting—”
― Stephen Baxter, quote from Manifold: Time

“I gulped; I had the overwhelming sensation that what we had done wasn’t enough. I’m not sure what I had expected, maybe a fairy tale ending
where a magic wand fixed everything, including all the darkness we had been through.
But this was no fairy tale. Nothing could bring back the thirty boys that had died. Nothing could take away the grief that had torn their family’s
hearts into shreds. Experiences like this, I realized, are wounds that never quite healed; they stayed with you and no amount of justice would erase
the scar.”
― Lani Woodland, quote from Intrinsical

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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