Top 35 Marjan Kamali Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “May you always be happy and may all your days be filled with beautiful words.”

— Marjan Kamali

2. “Roya’s favorite place in all of Tehran was the Stationery Shop. It was on the corner of Churchill Street and Hafez Avenue, opposite the Russian embassy and right across the street from her school.”

— Marjan Kamali

3. “The past was always there, lurking in the corners, winking at you when you thought you’d moved on, hanging on to your organs from the inside.”

— Marjan Kamali

4. “Why doesn’t his heart let go? Why do some people stay lodged in our souls, stuck in our throats, imprinted in our minds?”

— Marjan Kamali

5. “She could spend an entire afternoon just looking at fountain pens and ink bottles or flipping through books that spoke of poetry and love and loss.”

— Marjan Kamali

6. “She would not have understood, then, that time is not linear but circular. There is no past, present, future. Roya was the woman she was today and the seventeen-year-old girl in the Stationery Shop, always. She and Bahman were one, and she and Walter were united. Kyle was her soul and Marigold would never die.”

— Marjan Kamali

7. “Look at love How it tangles With the one fallen in love Look at spirit How it fuses with earth Giving it new life.”

— Marjan Kamali

8. “It is a love from which we never recover.”

— Marjan Kamali

9. “He laughed. And when he did, his face opened up entirely. His eyes carried the laughter; they filled with a kindness that was breathtaking.”

— Marjan Kamali

10. “I told you, Roya Khanom. The boy wants to change the world. That requires rush.”

— Marjan Kamali

11. “I’m not scared. The only thing that scares me is God. And guess what, Mina? God is not a fanatic.”

— Marjan Kamali

12. “In the fog of jasmine, she kissed him. It was like landing somewhere she should have been all along, a different plane, soft and unbelievably seductive – a place completely theirs but one she’d never dared explore.”

— Marjan Kamali

13. “For that fraction of time, he was entirely hers.”

— Marjan Kamali

14. “The truth is, my young lady, that fate has written the script for your destiny on your forehead from the very beginning. We can’t see it. But it’s there. And the young, who love so passionately, have no idea how ugly this world is... This world is without compassion.”

— Marjan Kamali

15. “In your presence, I found a calm.”

— Marjan Kamali

16. “Mr. Fakhri kept the shelves stocked with Persian classics and poetry and translations of literature from all over the world.”

— Marjan Kamali

17. “You might think the world is complicated and full of lost souls, that people who’ve touched your life and disappeared will never be found, but in the end all of that can change.”

— Marjan Kamali

18. “One day she might forget the helplessness of standing there while words burned. One day she might be far away from this terror. But the smell of charred paper would always be part of her, embedded in her skin.”

— Marjan Kamali

19. “How did Americans keep up their good spirits day in, day out, year-round? It had to be the brand-shiny-newness of their country. It had to be all that freedom. No thousands of years’ worth of stultifying rules to observe.”

— Marjan Kamali

20. “The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.”

— Marjan Kamali

21. “She found too much cheer undesirable, smacking of falseness. How did Americans keep up their good spirits day in, day out, year-round? It had to be the brand-shiny-newness of their country. It had to be all that freedom. No thousands of years’ worth of stultifying rules to observe. Just easy-peasy rolling with the flow.”

— Marjan Kamali

22. “Yes, she loved him. The truth of that was like a wave that washed over and submerged her in salty torrents, knotting her hair and stinging her nose, pulling the life out from under her. Of course she loved him. The earth was round, day turned into night, he was in front of her and she loved him.”

— Marjan Kamali

23. “If only she could somehow shield him from danger, from loss, from grief.”

— Marjan Kamali

24. “She was willing to accept a lot of things, but seeing her old lover for the first time in sixty years while wearing fat Eskimo boots was one of the few things she could not accept.”

— Marjan Kamali

25. “After the film, he had walked with her in the summer twilight. The sky was lavender and layered with shades of purple so varied, they seemed impossible.”

— Marjan Kamali

26. “She would not have understood, then, that time is not linear but circular. There is no past, present, future. Roya was the woman she was today and the seventeen-year-old girl in the Stationery Shop, always. She and Bahman were one, and she and Walter were united. Kyle was her soul and Marigold would never die. The past was always there, lurking in the corners, winking at you when you thought you’d moved on, hanging on to your organs from the inside.”

— Marjan Kamali

27. “Better than being here with your throat choked by a dictator and with a government that can shoot at will.”

— Marjan Kamali

28. “Roya leaned against the shelves lined with books as Bahman talked, her back digging into the spines of poetry and politics. If he went on too long about representation and taxes and trade, she simply focused on his eyes, lost, but in the best of ways.”

— Marjan Kamali

29. “This was the societal web of niceties and formalities and expected good female behavior that often suffocated her.”

— Marjan Kamali

30. “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered. F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.”

— Marjan Kamali

31. “No mom to come home to, call on the phone, cook a favorite dish with. No mom to tell her that everything would be all right.”

— Marjan Kamali

32. “Now that she was here, she realized there were no huge teacups in which people sat and laughed, but the people still spun endlessly.”

— Marjan Kamali

33. “This time she didn’t add the obligatory exclamation mark that seemed necessary for covering up misery around here.”

— Marjan Kamali

34. “Everything – every detail, every word, every second, every person – reminded Roya of Marigold. Except that reminded wasn’t the right word. Reminded meant that she had to forget to remember again. But she never forgot. Everything was linked to Marigold; nothing, really, could be separated from her ever.”

— Marjan Kamali

35. “Behind the blue blazer he wore, Roya was aware of an innocence that most people would give anything to own. She envied him this simplicity, this lack of complication.”

— Marjan Kamali

36. “When Kyle arrived, a small pocket of air had been let into their tightly wrapped bubble of privacy and pain.”

— Marjan Kamali