You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.
Other people’s sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly emphasize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does this say about my life, my pains, my anguish?
One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you.
Going away isn’t going to help as much as you think. The memory stays with you, and the stain. It’s not something you slough off once you leave.
This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.
My toe as a lethal weapon!
It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.
That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and formulas.
Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.