“Light a candle for me, I used to whisper to no one.
Someone
Anyone
If you're out there
Please tell me you can feel this fire.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“She put my hand in the fire once. Jus to see if it would burn, she said. Just to check if it was a regular hand, she said. I was 6 years old then. I remember because it was my birthday.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“I don't consider myself a moral man. I do not philosophize about life or bother with laws and principles that govern most people. I do not pretend to know the difference between right and wrong. But I do live by a certain kind of code. And somethimes, I think, you have how to shoot first.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“I fold myself into a corner of this room and bury my head in my knees and rock back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and I wish and I wish and I wish and I dream of impossible things until I've cried myself to sleep.
I wonder what it would be like to have a friend.
And then I wonder who else is locked in this asylum. I wonder where the other screams are coming from.
I wonder if they're coming from me.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“On the bleakst days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give theam a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again. (p. 193)”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“I've learned to stare at things. The walls. My hands. The cracks in the walls. The lines on my fingers. The shades of gray in the concrete. The shape of my fingernails. I pick one thing and stare at it for what must be hours. I keep time in my head by counting the seconds as they pass. I keep days in my head by writing them down. Today is day two. Today is the second day. Today is a day.
Today.
It's so cold. It's so cold. It's so cold.
Please please please
I started screaming today.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“Because these words I write down are the only proof I have that I'm still alive”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“No one wants a dandelion.
They crop up all over the place, ugly and unfortunate, an average blossom in a world desperatly seeking beauty. They're weeds, people say. They're uninteresting and offer no fragrance and there are too many of them, too much of them, we don't want them, destroy them.
Dandelions are a nuisance,
We desire the buttercups, the daffodils, the morning glories. We want the azalea, the poinsettia, the calla lily. We pluck them from our gradens and plant them in our homes and we don't seem to remember their toxic nature.
We don't seem to care that
if you get too close?
if you take a small bite?
The beauty is replaced wit pain and laced with a posion that laughs in your blood, destroys your organs, infevts your heart.
But pick a dandelion.
Pick a dandelion and make a salad, eat the leaves, the flower, the stem. Thread it in your hair, plant it in the ground and watch it thrive.
Pick a dandelion and close your eyes
make a wish
blow it into the wind.
Watch it
change
the
world.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“I’ve never read anything like this before. I’ve never read anything that could speak directly to my bones.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“This doesn’t happen. People aren’t forgotten like this. Not abandoned like this.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“He was their father, her husband, and the reason they all died a brutal, untimely death. And some days i wonder why I insist on keeping myself alive.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
“Because i never really know, i still can’t tell the difference, I’m never quite certain whether or not i’m actually alive.”
― Tahereh Mafi, quote from Unite Me
Tahereh Mafi
Born place: The United States
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“But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Island of the Day Before
“I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel, she said. I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from In Our Time
“You alive?” Hadrian asked.
“If I were dead, I don’t think there’d be geese.” Royce tilted his head up to catch the arrow of birds heading south. “But maybe they’re evil geese.”
“Evil geese?”
“We have no idea what goes on in the water fowl world. They might have been a gang that stole eggs or something.”
“I’m guessing you have a fever.”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Crown Tower
“In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
“When I was first at court and he was the young husband of a beautiful wife, he was a golden king. They called him the handsomest prince in Christendom, and that was not flattery. Mary Boleyn was in love with him, Anne was in love with him, I was in love with him. There was not one girl at court, nor one girl in the country, who could resist him. Then he turned against his wife, Queen Katherine, a good woman, and Anne taught him how to be cruel.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
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