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Kindle Notes & Highlights
One, every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.
One is the kind of villain who wants more for himself. The other is the kind who wants less for others.
In Oklahoma, rich people have nice things. In Iran, they have nice spaces. Courtyards and fountain streams versus sports cars and mounted screens.
KING OR QUEEN READER, this is a good place in the story to hold our breath—with Sima in the demons’ clutches, running through Isfahan, toward a home she knows she can never live in again—and ask a question that relates to this: Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks? Be careful with the answer. It’s as important as every word from Scheherazade’s mouth that saved her life. And everybody’s got an answer.
A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything. I don’t have an answer for you. This is the kind of thing you live your whole life thinking about probably.
Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love. And sometimes, like Sima, you get neither. OH, AND IN CASE IT wasn’t obvious, the answer is both. God should be both. If a god isn’t, that is no God.
I mean, you don’t have to believe any of it and I wouldn’t blame you. But if they were accidents, then it was like putting a jigsaw puzzle into a tumble dryer and having it come out with all the pieces in the right place.
