Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

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

Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.

The better question is, Can God create a law so big that He himself has to obey it? Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.

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

People are like that. They’re immune to the sadness of others.

Memories are tricky things. They can fade or fester. You have to seal them up tight like pickles and keep out impurities like how hurt you feel when you open them. Or they’ll ferment and poison your brain.

In any story the two hardest things to be are a widow or an orphan. Those are the bad cards to draw from the deck marked “life.” Because those are the two moments the people you love the most die. It’s heart break. Heart shatter. Heart starve. It’s so much loss that it’s easier if you just died and started the game over. But you can’t. You have to wander. Part of it is losing your tribe and being homeless. Part of it is being alone in the dark.

It’s beautiful. How badly we all want love. It’s tragic. How bad we are at searching for it.

And how do you know anything for certain anyway? Maybe don’t be so certain all the time.

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.

“Yes, the salute is a Persian symbol for shielding your eyes from the light of greatness when a boss comes in the room.”

She was right. Or, I didn’t remember if she was, but it was how every conversation ended. I didn’t say anything, because there’s no reason to talk to people who are just waiting to pounce on your flaws and put their fingers in the holes.

if you go back enough in history, everybody comes from ancestors who wandered around looking for refuge. Everybody was poor at some point.

Maybe half-good is as good as it gets in this life. And maybe that’s why my mom was so interested in the next one.

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. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

“Oh eat it now,” he said. “Who cares. The whole world will die someday and who cares if you had a bad breakfast?”

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

But I’ll tell you one thing now. If I ever have a kid, I wouldn’t let them go, ever. Even if they had to leave Earth, and I had to follow them into airless space, I’d hold on to them and suffocate, but at least I’d have held them close. And I wouldn’t hit my wife either, not for any reason, not even if she hit me.

what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.