Call Me Zebra Quotes

“That's life. You travel the world over, aimless, friendless, adrift. Then suddenly you find another rodent who shares the sorrows of your juiced organs. I felt as though he had ironed out the wrinkled sheet of my heart.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra

“We are ill-fated, destined to wander in perpetual exile across a world hostile to our intelligence.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“I thought of Dante the Pilgrim, of the words of warning he had received: You will know how hard a path it is for one who goes ascending and descending others’ stairs.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“I have been pushed by the world into a state of psychic feudalism. and you want me to make myself vulnerable to you. How much vulnerability do you think one person can take? Do you want me to rip my skin off and stand in the wind, bleeding and raw?”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra

“A love I was in no position to receive despite desperately needing it. No. Not I with my castaway, homeless body. Where would I store it? It would fall right through me, sink into the depths of my void. I would have needed so much love, more than any one person is capable of giving, to fill that gaping hole at the center of my life. And, besides his love had been capricious, inconsistent, flighty.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra

“the wheels of history are always turning and there is no knowing who will be run over next.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“Love, like death and literature and liberty, is everywhere and nowhere at once.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“Like any good guru, I thought, all I need are pilgrims, a roving pack of the world’s marginalized and exiled, other .1 percenters, who, unlike Ludo, would understand my poverty, the sting of my uninterrupted loneliness.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“I hail from the land of not belonging, directly beyond the frontier of any nation.” I unabashedly delivered my truth. “Your home is my periphery,” I said.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“It seemed his face was set in a permanent expression of confusion and disgust with the state of the world. A man of strict conscience, taciturn, noble, and principled to the extreme.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“I said: “You’ve made progress. You’ve acknowledged that life is less truthful than literature.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“Life is bitter, time remorseless, and people remain civilized only so long as their own needs aren’t threatened. Not a second longer. They will suck the marrow out of your bones if you let them.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“I, Zebra, am recrossing borders I have already crossed in order to map the literature of the void and prove once and for all that any thought worth preserving in our pitiable human record was manifested in the mind of an exile, an immigrant, a refugee"--my mind and mouth had aligned themselves to perfection--"persons fleeing from persecution, and/or otherwise homeless beings.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra

“reality is either liquid, or it consists of nothing at all.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“He read and wrote under conditions of interior exile. It was in this cruel atmosphere that Josep Pla, the writer, was brought into existence, overtaking Josep Pla, the imminent lawyer.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“I am a wandering speculative border intellectual, surviving by my wits, roaming the land. Not unlike Ibn al-Arabi, Bashō, Omar Khayyám, and Badi’ al-Zaman, those solitary walkers, extemporaneous philosophers, literary tricksters, the wise and wicked ancestors of Cervantes, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Acker.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“I, a literary terrorist, am going to force life to dissolve its resistance toward me.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“Am I so worthless that I am barred from taking pleasure in my own suffering?”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“While you two expose yourselves to the detrimental effects of a formal education—reduced self-knowledge, submission to authority, covert institutional indoctrination in linear time—I am employing unorthodox methods of learning in order to facilitate grand associative leaps, heightened cognition, and transcendental intellectualism,”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“it is my duty, as the last remaining member of the Autodidacts, Anarchists, and Atheists, to make a major philosophical intervention aimed at correcting the skewed and pitifully narrow perception of the world’s pseudo intellectuals and heretics, your erroneous brethren!”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“I told them that I would never use the term small talk, let alone engage in it as an activity. I considered speaking to be a grand waste of time unless its purpose was to get the big unsaid truths out in the open.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“Books, I realized, are connected to one another via nearly invisible superhighways of language, the way stars are interrelated via light and dust, the debris of the universe.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“What’s more, I realized, is that those among us who have not had to seek refuge in a land of hostile strangers, who have not been persecuted or strangled by the crushing hand of grief, maintain the privilege of deluding themselves into believing in a coherent and linear reality; in other words, metaphysically speaking, they think they are immortal!”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“Illiterates, abecedarians, elitists, rodents all—I will tell you this: I, Zebra, born Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini on a scorching August day in 1982, am a descendent of a long line of self-taught men who repeatedly abandoned their capital, Tehran, where blood has been washed with blood for a hundred years, to take refuge in Nowshaht, in the languid, damp regions of Mazandaran.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra

“We had made it to the other side. We had arrived at the golden blue sky I had seen in the distance. We had arrived at what only a moment ago had been the future, and in its soft atmosphere, the plane glided with ease. I looked back at the darkness that was now behind us. I saluted the abyss of my past and thought of the exile that had repeated throughout my life like a bad joke, like a wretched eternal return that had levelled my psyche and left in its wake a void through which I could hear the wind whistle.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra

“A vain search that turned up nothing, because no matter where you go, knot-brained idiots out number honest and straightforward men.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra

“Because if you know the ways of man, the various conditions of his inquisitous mind, you will not be stumped by fear, guilt, avarice, grief, or remorse, and therefore, when the time comes, you will not hesitate to plumb the depths of the abyss and send out a resounding alarm to the unthinking masses, those who are willfully blind, warning them of the advancing army of the unresolved past.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra

“I turned that word—home—around in my mouth. It tasted like dust, ash, decomposed corpses, and simultaneously, like fresh mulberries, cherries ripened in the sun, rose water, pulverized saffron, dates.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“But don’t worry, I am an irregular genius who is in the process of synchronizing her multiple minds in order to acquire the privilege to rise in the morning and say a great and coherent yes to life.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean

“Nietzsche: A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at the bottom comes up.”
― Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Call Me Zebra: A Coming-of-Age Journey Across the Mediterranean