Top 35 Daniel Nayeri Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If it looks real and feels real, do you think it matters if it’s real?”

— Daniel Nayeri

2. “I think the biggest lie the devil ever told was that beauty and goodness are the same.”

— Daniel Nayeri

3. “What you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.”

— Daniel Nayeri

4. “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

5. “To lose something you never had can be just as painful – because it is the hope of having it that you lose.”

— Daniel Nayeri

6. “Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.”

— Daniel Nayeri

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “If you don’t get caught, you deserve everything you steal.”

— Daniel Nayeri

11. “But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend.”

— Daniel Nayeri

12. “Do you know what makes someone beautiful? Confidence. You don’t have to have this shape eyes or that shape lips. No one seems to be able to decide which shape is best anyway. You can have every kind of blemish. It’s confidence that attracts people. That’s what everybody’s looking for. It’s what no potion can really give you. And believe me, Belle, you’ve got it. You’ve got it if you want it.”

— Daniel Nayeri

13. “If you imagine someone watching you all the time, even when you think you’re alone, seeing every time you make a face, that someone would know more about you than you think.”

— Daniel Nayeri

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Because some things that seem unimportant now can change the course of human history – and I am a student of human history.”

— Daniel Nayeri

17. “Maybe it was a storybook beginning.”

— Daniel Nayeri

18. “Because you don’t spend so many decades in someone’s house without knowing their game.”

— Daniel Nayeri

19. “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

20. “In this life, you have winners and losers. the more you win, the higher you go.”

— Daniel Nayeri

21. “We don’t owe anyone our sadness, but the sharing of it is what friends do. It makes the sadness less. Friends don’t care if you like the same football squad.”

— Daniel Nayeri

22. “Memories are always partly untrue.”

— Daniel Nayeri

23. “Human history is full of great men, great women, individuals, with the will for power – all of them with governesses like her.”

— Daniel Nayeri

24. “Maybe we get the endings we deserve. Or maybe the endings we practice.”

— Daniel Nayeri

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Here is something I would like to tell you – stories get better as they get more true.”

— Daniel Nayeri

29. “I won’t tell you about her yet, because sometimes love has to be kept secret. If other people find out, they will attack it.”

— Daniel Nayeri

30. “If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.”

— Daniel Nayeri

31. “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

32. “In all our lives, my sister only told me her stories twice. We never compared our memories, ever. I think because where they were the same, they were painful and obvious. And where they were different – even just a little – they were so important to each of us, that we hated each other for not remembering them as we did.”

— Daniel Nayeri

33. “The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.”

— Daniel Nayeri

34. “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

35. “I divorced her in my imagined future and gave her back to God for safekeeping and offered my own heart to Him for repairs.”

— Daniel Nayeri

36. “You can’t waste time with dignity.”

— Daniel Nayeri

37. “A patchwork story is the shame of a refugee.”

— Daniel Nayeri

38. “But she doesn’t understand that people are immune to the happiness of others too, not just their pain. They’re numb to everything.”

— Daniel Nayeri