Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

A patchwork memory is the shame of a refugee.

To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose.

I HEARD THIS ONCE: When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things: 1. The streets were not paved with gold. 2. The streets were not paved at all. 3. They were the ones expected to do the paving.

One, every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.

But you either get the truth, or you get good news—you don’t often get both.

I think making anything is a brave thing to do.

Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for.

I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do. And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.

maybe love is always measured by what you’re willing to kill.

If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side.

Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks?

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.

The artisans of Kashan and Isfahan and Tabriz and Mashad all knew that only God was perfect—the only one who could listen to and speak the perfect truth. To remind themselves, and to show their humility, they would purposefully include one missed knot in every rug, one imperfection.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made.

“Stories are stories. Life is life. They kiss and they marry, but they die alone.”

Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do. You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.

I realized that myths are just legends that everybody agrees on, and legends are just stories that got bigger over time.

Hope. The anticipation that the God who listens in love will one day speak justice. The hope that some final fantasy will come to pass that will make everything sad untrue. Unpainful.

IMAGINE YOU’RE IN A refugee camp and you know it’ll be a year or more before anything happens. It’s going to be a tough year. But for the person who thinks, “At the end of this year, I’m going somewhere to be free, a place without secret police, free to believe whatever I want and teach my children.” And you believe it’ll be hard, but eventually, you’ll build a whole new life—that’s like winning the lottery. It’s like saying you’ll get one hundred million dollars at the end of the year. But if you’re thinking every place is the same, and there will always be people who abuse you, and about how poor you’ll be at first. The sadness overtakes you; it’s like saying you’ll get a soup and a sandwich at the end of the year, and that’s it. Here’s the thing, you’ll both have the same year at Hotel Barba. But one of you will be looking around with joy and anticipation, wondering what you can do to prepare your kids for the new world. And the other will be slumped in the courtyard, surrendered to the idea that it’s all one long river of blood. I don’t know which belief is true—nobody does. But what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.

Memories are just stories we tell ourselves, after all.