Shirin Quotes

“Ocean had given me hope. He’d made me believe in people again. His sincerity had rubbed me raw, had peeled back the stubborn layers of anger I’d lived in for so long. Ocean made me want to give the world a second chance.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“Be careful with that ," I said, nodding at the paper, "because if you text me too much, you'll have to marry me. It's the rules in my religion.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“I was so raw from repeated exposure to cruelty that now even the most minor abrasions left a mark.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“Ocean, azizam,” she said, “please tell Shirin she should stop swearing so much. It’s always asshole this, bullshit that. I say to her, Shirin joon, why are you so obsessed with shit? Why everything is shit?”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“I had never, ever touched someone and felt like this: like I was holding electricity inside of me.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“How can you say that?” he said, and I heard his voice break. “How can you even think that? I want this more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I want everything with you,” he said. “I want all of it with you. I want you. I want this forever.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“I got lost in the feel of him, in the heat of his skin, in the way his body shook when he broke away and I felt like I was dreaming, like I’d forgotten how to think.
(...) We broke apart, fighting to breathe, holding on to each other like we were drowning, like we’d been lost, left for dead in a very large expanse of sea.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“He said he promised he wouldn’t try to kiss me again and I wanted to say don’t you dare promise not to kiss me again but I didn’t.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“But Ocean was all the traditionally pleasant things a girl might like about a guy, which made his friendliness dangerous to me. I might’ve been an angry teenager, but I wasn’t also blind. I wasn’t magically immune to cute
guys, and it had not escaped my notice that Ocean was a superlative kind of good-looking. He dressed nicely. He smelled pleasant. He was very polite. But he and I seemed to come from worlds so diametrically opposed that I knew better than to allow his friendship in my life.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“I often felt like a very old person trapped in a young person’s body.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“The day passed.
People had butchered my name, teachers hadn’t known what the hell to do with me, my math teacher looked at my face and gave a five-minute speech to the class about how people who don’t love this country should just go back to where they came from and I stared at my textbook so hard it was days before I could get the quadratic equation out of my head.
Not one of my classmates spoke to me, no one but the kid who accidentally assaulted my shoulder with his bio book.
I wished I didn’t care.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“When I was a kid and would tell my mom that people at school were mean to me, she’d pat me on the head and tell me stories about how she’d lived through war and an actual revolution, and when she was fifteen someone cracked open her skull in the middle of the street while her
best friend was gutted like a fish so, hey, why don’t you just eat your Cheerios and walk it off, you ungrateful American child. I ate my cheerios. I didn't talk about it.”
― Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea