Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

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...