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...”
“My mother had comforted me with tales ever since I was small. Sometimes they helped me peel a problem like an onion, or gave me ideas about what to do; other times, they calmed me so much that I would fall into a soothing sleep. My father used to say that her tales were better than the best medicine. Sighing, I burrowed into my mother's body like a child, knowing that the sound of her voice would be a balm on my heart.”
“En el amor, como agua del mar te has desatado.
(In love, you have loosened yourself like seawater)”
“And now, as I'm lying alone in my own bed, I keep thinking about writhing against him last night, naked and vulnerable. Even after we'd both risen and fallen, peaked and plummeted, even after Marcus was physically shrinking from inside me, I couldn't stop clutching, crying, trying. Trying to pull him deeper, deeper, deeper within.
Trying to make him more a part of me than I am myself.”
“An emotional debt is hard to square.”
“And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives.”
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