More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.
Arash’s parents, then his sister, and now his brother-in-law and nephew had all left him to be feasted on by his ghosts.
not unlike the library you believed yourself dangerous and you burned,
his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.
These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.”
IT FEELS SO AMERICAN TO DISCOUNT DREAMS BECAUSE THEY’RE not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.
Any volcano that has erupted since the Holocene, ancient history, is considered active. I haven’t. Does that make me inert? Or overdue?
