Mojgan Ghazirad > Mojgan's Quotes

“I believe it was not only us who struggled to carve out a face in the full moon that night. We were, for sure, not the first nation to invent this phenomenon. Perhaps the Chinese had envisioned their princes and princesses on the moon, naming them full moon of the full moons before us. The name traveled perilous paths in deep hollows and high mountains from east to west, got translated to Arabic and became Badr-al-Budur. Perhaps Arabs couldn’t have invented the stories of One Thousand and One Nights suddenly out of the blue in one night. They must have heard the stories from Samarkand to Shiraz to Baghdad, and finally, an ingenious narrator gathered the stories and retold them in the lilting voice of a lady in dire straits to make them last for eternity in the hearts and minds of eastern people. Perhaps we were not the only nation who, in vain, dipped into the dark ditch of sorcery or soared into the sky to sketch the guise of a hero on the moon. It was mankind’s imagination at work.”
― Mojgan Ghazirad, The House On Sun Street

“I could never forget the face of the man who offered the box of baklava to us on the eve of the Islamic Revolution. He often chased me in my dreams, forcing me to choke down things I never wanted to eat. His keffiyeh became the hallmark of fear, for it represented the revolutionary men who carried guns on the streets and forced us to follow the Islamic hijab in public, which was never before obligatory in Iran.”
― Mojgan Ghazirad, The House On Sun Street

“This was not the encounter I’d dreamed of on the way back home. I flew between the fluffy clouds, longing for the radiant rays of kindred love that had illuminated the house on Sun Street. I was waiting for the moment I could hug Agha Joon and tell him about our life in America. I wanted to circle my hands around Azra’s neck and fill my lungs with the rose perfume she wore in the triangle of her long neck, her shoulders, and the rim of her floral chador. The sweet scent of home inhabited that triangle, different from the saccharine-filled marshmallow fragrance I’d gotten used to in the United States. A poignant pressure squeezed my heart as I entered the gloomy, polluted dusk of Tehran.”
― Mojgan Ghazirad, The House On Sun Street

“I always wonder if I should have avoided looking inside the coffin, as Maman had suggested. Why did she bring me to that horrendous place if she really didn’t want me to see? Now I only come to one conclusion: she wanted me to realize the true nature of the lies the Islamic regime was spoon-feeding to us in the media. She wanted me to see how gloomy and dull that deified cemetery appeared in reality, despite the revolutionaries’ effort to glorify the culture of martyrdom in the country.”
― Mojgan Ghazirad, The House On Sun Street