Top 35 Adib Khorram Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You’re the only person who never wanted me to change.”

— Adib Khorram

2. “I slid down against one of the planters and breathed in. My chest felt heavy, like someone had dropped a planet on me. Inside, my family sat around, playing Rook and talking so I couldn’t understand them. Dancing dances they had danced with each other for years. Sharing jokes and stories I would never be a part of. Eating khiar and drinking doogh like True Persians... I didn’t belong.”

— Adib Khorram

3. “I wanted to die. I wasn’t allowed to say that, not out loud. The one time I did – and it was only hyperbole – Dad freaked out and threatened to send me to a hospital. “Don’t ever joke about that, Darius.” I didn’t really want to die, anyway. I just wanted to slip into a black hole and never come out.”

— Adib Khorram

4. “The thing is, I never had a friend like Sohrab before. One who understood me without even trying. Who knew what it was like to be stuck on the outside because of one little thing that set you apart.”

— Adib Khorram

5. “How could I be a tourist in my own past?”

— Adib Khorram

6. “I was one tiny pulsar in a swirling, luminous galaxy of Iranians, held together by the gravity of thousands of years of culture and heritage.”

— Adib Khorram

7. “I loved the quiet. Even if it sometimes made me think of sad things. Like whether anyone would miss me if I was dead.”

— Adib Khorram

8. “It’s just hard,” I said. “Everyone knows everyone. And everyone speaks Farsi. And everyone knows the dances. And I... ”... “Darioush.” Sohrab bumped my shoulder again. “No one wants me here.” “Everyone wants you here. We have a saying in Farsi. It translates to ‘your place was empty’. We say it when we miss somebody.” I sniffed. “Your place was empty before. But this is your family. You belong here.”

— Adib Khorram

9. “Ghorbanat beram is one of those perfect Farsi phrases you can’t quite translate into English. The closest thing is: I would give my life for yours. Sometimes it was just hyperbole. But for Sohrab, it was literal. And it was literal for me too. That is what it means to have a best friend.”

— Adib Khorram

10. “Suicide isn’t the only way you can lose someone to depression.”

— Adib Khorram

11. “I had never been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, but Dr. Howell said that anxiety and depression often went hand in hand. Comorbidity, he called it. It was an ominous-sounding word. It made me anxious.”

— Adib Khorram

12. “The silence between us hung heavy with all the things we couldn’t say. All the things we knew without them being said out loud.”

— Adib Khorram

13. “Being depressed doesn’t mean I’m not happy. It’s like, happy is one color. And depressed is another color. And you can paint happy, and then paint a little depression around the edges.”

— Adib Khorram

14. “You deserve people in your life who make you happy, Darius. No matter what. Just remember that. Okay?”

— Adib Khorram

15. “Dr. Howell likes to say that depression is anger turned inward. I had so much anger turned inward, I could have powered a warp core. But without the proper magnetic field strength, it exploded outward instead.”

— Adib Khorram

16. “Mom always said she named me after Darius the Great, but I think she and Dad were setting themselves up for the disappointment, naming me after a historical figure like that. I was many things – D-Hole, D-Wad, D’s Nuts – but I was definitely not great.”

— Adib Khorram

17. “I loved my little sister. When I looked at her, I felt the same way as when I stared into the ancient flame of the Atashkadeh. Or when I heard the azan ring out across the city.”

— Adib Khorram

18. “Dr. Howell likes to say that depression is anger turned inward.”

— Adib Khorram

19. “I never knew how to talk to Mamou, even though I was happy to see her. It was like I had this well inside me, but every time I saw Mamou, it got blocked up. I didn’t know how to let my feelings out.”

— Adib Khorram

20. “You can know things without them being said out loud. I knew Sohrab and I were going to be friends for life. Sometimes you can just tell that kind of thing.”

— Adib Khorram

21. “I was cut off by the azan sounding... I imagined... a neural network spread throughout the entire country and to the Iranian diaspora across the whole planet. I felt very Persian just then, even though I didn’t understand the chanting. Even though I wasn’t Muslim. I was one tiny pulsar in a swirling, luminous galaxy of years of culture and heritage. There was nothing like it back home. Maybe the Super Bowl.”

— Adib Khorram

22. “Our family was woven into the fabric of Yazd. Into the stones and the sky.”

— Adib Khorram

23. “That’s what being depressed does. It’s like a supermassive black hole between your sense of self and your actual self, and all you can see is the way you look through the gravitational lensing of your own inadequacies. “Hey.”

— Adib Khorram

24. “It was a nice kind of quiet. The kind you could wrap yourself up in like a blanket.”

— Adib Khorram

25. “Sohrab had no walls inside. I loved that about him.”

— Adib Khorram

26. “True Persians are heavily invested in the reproductive opportunities of their descendants.”

— Adib Khorram

27. “For Fariba Bahrami, love was an opportunity, not a burden.”

— Adib Khorram

28. “It’s okay to keep something you love just for you.”

— Adib Khorram

29. “But even as I laughed, I thought about how Mamou and Mrs. Rezaei and Sohrab had danced this dance together before. How they had celebrated Nowruz together before. How Mamou had kissed Sohrab on both cheeks and invited him inside for tea before. More times than anyone could count. My chest imploded. Just a little bit. I hated how Sohrab had a larger share of my grandmother’s life than I did.”

— Adib Khorram

30. “Just like I had to pretend I didn’t like having tea parties with my little sister, Laleh had to pretend she didn’t like kisses from her big brother, but she wasn’t very good at pretending yet.”

— Adib Khorram

31. “Like I said, Landon still hadn’t mastered the art of taarof, which required you to politely decline food even if you actually wanted it, and to force people to take food they said they didn’t want.”

— Adib Khorram

32. “I wondered if all fathers secretly wanted to kill their sons. Just a little bit.”

— Adib Khorram

33. “How was it?′ ‘It was... ’ I didn’t know what to say. How could I explain Mamou and Babou and Sohrab and football and the rooftop to someone who had never experienced them? How could I talk about them when I still felt the ache?”

— Adib Khorram

34. “Going back generation after generation, through revolutions and regime changes, wars and invasions and pogroms. How many of them had stood where I was standing?”

— Adib Khorram

35. “This was another taarof: Sohrab giving me his nicer cleats. And invoking my being a guest was one of the strongest strategies you could employ in taarof.”

— Adib Khorram

36. “We were friends back then, in the way that everyone is friends in kindergarten, before sociopolitical alliances begin to cement, and then, by the time third grade rolls around, you find yourself spending every game of Heads Down, Thumbs Up with your head down and your thumb up, completely ignored by your entire class until you begin to wonder if you’ve turned invisible.”

— Adib Khorram

37. “With five minutes left in the second half of our game against the Willow Bluffs High School Trojans – seriously, their fight song was “Roll on, roll on, Trojans,” the sort of innuendo that constituted psychological warfare against teenaged guys – we had kept the score tied, 1–1.”

— Adib Khorram