Everything Sad Is Untrue Quotes

“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...And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything...Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love....God should be both. If a god isn't, that is no God.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“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.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“What you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose. The hope that in this world, there are magical fish who will give you advice and warning, when really, the future is unknowable and infinitely dangerous.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“The legend of my mom is that she can’t be stopped. Not when you hit her. Not when a whole country full of goons puts her in a cage. Not even if you make her poor and try to kill her slowly in the little-by-little poison of sadness. And the legend is true. I think because she’s fixed her eyes on something beyond the rivers of blood, to a beautiful place on the other side. How else would anybody do it?”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“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.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last.

Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others.

He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime.

That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister.

And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you.

When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that.

And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you.

And she believed.

When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?”

Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian.

All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now.

But I don’t have an answer for them.

How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.”

Why else would she believe it?

It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life.

My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise.

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.

That or Sima is insane.

There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it.

If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake.

But she doesn’t think so.

She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed.

And she’s poor now.

People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better.

It’s true.

We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma.

We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong.

But you can’t make Sima agree with you.

It’s true.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

This whole story hinges on it.

Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Imagine you're evil.

Not misunderstood.

Not sad.

But evil.

Imagine you've got a heart that spends all day wanting more.

Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity.

Imagine you're like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers.

Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria.

Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey.

Imagine you're evil and you don't do any of those things, but you're like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what's going on and you say nothing's going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English.

Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you're disgusted, because you don't like meanness. But you don't do anything or tell anyone.

Imagine how much you've got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it.

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.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Memories are always partly untrue.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Sometimes you just want somebody to look at a thing with you and say, “Yes. That is a thing you’re looking at. You haven’t lied to yourself.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble.

Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away.

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.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“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.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Can God create a mountain so big that He himself couldn’t lift it? It’s trying to put God in a corner, because if He can or if He can’t, He’s not all-powerful. But the question is silly, because it assumes God is as stupid as we are. If you’re as big as God, there’s no such thing as “lifting.” It’s all just floating in a million universes you made. If you made an object of some insane, unusual size, then it’d still be a thing. And God is as big as everything at once. And as small. Physical stuff is too simple. 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.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“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.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“The lesson here is that your happiest memories can become your saddest all of a sudden.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“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.

What you're doing now is listening to me, in the parlor of your mind, but also speaking to yourself, thinking about the parts of me you like or the parts that aren't funny enough. You evaluate, like Mrs. Miller says. You think and wrestle with every word.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Maybe we get the endings we deserve. Or maybe the endings we practice.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Never believe that villains are hurting people by accident. They want to get better at their craft of breaking jaws just as you want to get better at art or music.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Here is something I would like to tell you—stories get better as they get more true.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“A patchwork story is the shame of a refugee.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Maybe there isn’t just one person designated for everybody. Maybe there’s a lot more to it---maybe you choose and you practice, and that’s what makes the love true.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“We are always choosing situations that hurt us. We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us. And then we think, what a horrible world that makes a weapon out of love. That stabs you with it, even when you can’t defend yourself and the other person hates you and wants to see you cry.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“I think He’s a God who listens as if we are his most important children, and I think He speaks to tell us so.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop,”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“I just wonder if they've had that feeling too. The one where you realize it's your fault that something beautiful is dead. And you know you weren't worth the trouble.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue