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ALL PERSIANS ARE LIARS and lying is a sin.
My mom says it’s true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn’t. Persians aren’t liars. They’re poets, which is worse.
Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.
If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.
The king was evil and made a bloody massacre of a thousand lives before he got to Scheherazade.
It’s a responsibility to be the king. You’ve got my whole life in your hands.
Of all the tales of marvel that I could tell you, none surpass in wonder and coolness the one I am about to tell.
I don’t know what the American grown-ups have for memories, but they can’t be as beautiful as mine.
When teachers brought us to the sod house in Oklahoma and told us it was ninety-eight years old, I asked why they’d made a museum out of it. The teacher looked at me like I was simple. “Because we preserve and cherish historical things,” she said. “But no one lives in it?” “No.” “So every ninety-eight years, people move out of their houses and turn them into museums?”
We didn’t stay there, of course. He wasn’t the kind of father you listened to.
They’ll think I want their pity. In America they distrust unhappy people. But I don’t want pity. I just wonder if they’ve had that feeling too. The one where you realize it’s your fault that something beautiful is dead. And you know you weren’t worth the trouble.
the hero’s always less than his legend.
don’t talk too much, and they’ll be “chill.”
But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw.
Like you, I want a friend.
what makes the champion a coward?” “Need?” “Yes. The weakness of needing something. Now the lion must beg for it. He is no king if he needs anything.”
He wants me to understand so badly. He wants me to know the Persian poets like I know American rappers. I feel desperate to give him the connection, but can’t.
THEY SAY MY FATHER’S family got their land from the king of India,
in gratitude for saving his daughter’s life.
he was a doctor. Not a rich guy with a stethoscope. Don’t imagine that. More like a young man who spent all his time in the library of the university, or the private archives of the local magistrate. He spent his money on herbs and plant roots and oils to make things like ointments for burns and cuts.
A myth is only an explanation, not an exploration.
this is the thing with legends. They are more detailed than myths, but not always more accurate.
she too might have loved the Persian doctor. Cursed though she was with illness—she might have
come to prefer it for his company. The tragedy of love would unfold as the doctor could never sit by and watch the princess in such pain. He would heal her and together they
would suffer the duller ache of longing. I would imagine him trudging behind a long carav...
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We don’t live in the heroic age. Our separation isn’t any great poetic struggle. It’s just pain. It’s just ripping bodies apart.
Everything we own is inside a hard gray suitcase. It is mostly coats and papers. There is one squished shoebox full of photos that my mom guards, and cries over when she
thinks we’re asleep.
stories get better as they get more true.
Abbas was truly and completely ruined.
When the guests at Tamar’s wedding ate the cream puffs, they could taste the truest thing in all the world at that moment—the baker’s pain.
When Tamar tasted one, it was a love letter. She ran to her room and sobbed into a pillow.
Memories are always partly untrue.
Mazloom is something you just want to hold and say sorry to. A victim.
people are immune to the happiness of others too, not just their pain. They’re numb to everything. They don’t even see her.
if you think people are stupid and mazloom and all you ever do is take from them, then they eventually learn how to survive you.
They learn to hide away everything they love, where you can’t touch it. And they won’t just hide it someplace easy to find, like a clown’s pockets, or anyplace in this world.
They’ll create a new world, with its own language, and they’ll hide everything there—all the favorite jokes they won’t say around you, all the best books, the spot on the wall that looks like a keyhole, being safe and free and com...
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hiding is something to do while you wait to get stronger.
That was how he knew
she had accepted him, even though she wasn’t his mother. And that was how he knew his siblings
weren’t ever going to...
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A patchwork memory
is the shame of a refugee.
I couldn’t
tell you what it feels like to have a grandpa.
To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose.
The hope that in this world, there are magical fish who will give you advice and warning, when really, the future is unknowable and infinitely dangerous.
every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.
the story of Aziz could have gone a million different
