Marjane Satrapi · 187 pages
Rating: (51.1K votes)
“Life is too short to be lived badly.”
“I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn't comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.”
“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.”
“Culture and education are the lethal weapons against all kinds of fundamentalism.”
“In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!”
“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.”
“Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.”
“Prosperity consists of two things: tea after a meal, and a cigarette after tea.”
“Is religion defending our physical integrity or is it just opposed to fashion?”
“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.”
“Night fell... "Night brings good counsel", my grandmother always told me.”
“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.”
“I wanted to die. Where were my parents to take me in their arms, to reassure me?”
“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?”
“Third: live together as long as you feel truly happy. Life is too short to be lived badly.”
“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...”
“But certainly the two best-known tales in the neighborhood - the key hauntings, if you will - concern the Red Room and the Screaming Staircase.'
There was a profound silence, abruptly broken by an enormously loud rumble from George's stomach. Plaster didn't actually fall from the ceiling, but it was close.
'Sorry,' he said cheerfully. 'Famished. I think I"ll have another doughnut, if you don't mind. Any takers?”
“Sabit fikirli, kafasını tek bir düşünceye takmış her türlü insan, yaşamım boyunca beni çekmiştir, çünkü bir insan kendini ne kadar sınırlarsa, öte yandan sonsuza o kadar yakın olur; işte böyle görünüşte dünyadan kopuk yaşayanlar, özel yapıları içinde karınca gibi, dünyanın tuhaf ve eşi benzeri olmayan bir maketini kurarlar.”
“What they don’t realize is this: Yes, they frighten me, but I have always been scared, since the day I got here. I was raised by the man who murdered my parents, reared in a land of monsters. I live with that fear, let it settle into my bones, and ignore it. If I didn’t pretend not to be scared, I would hide under my owl-down coverlets in Madoc’s estate forever. I would lie there and scream until there was nothing left of me.”
“Anything for Love
Fear isn't a reason when it come to love—it's an excuse. Anyone who has ever been in love will tell you that. When it happens, you don't think about the consequences. You'd turn your life upside down to be with that person. You'd do anything for them.”
“Which is why she’d fallen desperately in love the first time she’d met Sharlah. She’d looked into her foster daughter’s eyes and she’d known her. Just . . . known her. Sharlah’s fears, anxieties, fragile hope, bone-deep strength. Rainie saw all of her daughter. And she loved her, not in spite of her weaknesses, but because of them. Sharlah was a fighter.”
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