Top 500 Tahereh Mafi Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “We’re so good at masking our hunger until the knocks at the door cripple our dignity.”

— Tahereh Mafi

452. “Words, will live as long as people can remember them.”

— Tahereh Mafi

453. “He’s standing at the front door, hands shoved casually in his pockets, no fewer than six different guns pointed at his face.”

— Tahereh Mafi

454. “But one day, she swore, she’d breathe light and color back into the dimness that had diminished her life.”

— Tahereh Mafi

455. “I’m trying to untangle the truth from the false from assumptions from the postulations but run-on sentences are twisting around my throat.”

— Tahereh Mafi

456. “He has that kind of face. The kind of face that makes you forget where you are, who you are, what you might’ve been about to do or say. I’ve missed him so much. Missed his eyes.”

— Tahereh Mafi

457. “He’s smiling like someone’s strung the stars across his lips.”

— Tahereh Mafi

458. “But here, in the silent explosion of my heart, was a quiet that felt familiar.”

— Tahereh Mafi

459. “If only my emotions would understand the importance of excellent timing.”

— Tahereh Mafi

460. “My feelings were still inarticulate, comprising little more than tears and expletives.”

— Tahereh Mafi

461. “I keep sniffing my skin, pleasantly surprised by how nice it is to smell like a flower. I’ve never smelled like anything before.”

— Tahereh Mafi

462. “I can’t be my own person if I constantly require someone else to hold me together.”

— Tahereh Mafi

463. “Maybe it was enough to have learned that love was the unexpected weapon, that it was the knife I’d needed to cut through the Kevlar I wore every day.”

— Tahereh Mafi

464. “People are so preoccupied with making sense despite it being the most uninteresting thing to manufacture.” He shook his head. “Making magic,” he said, “is far more interesting than making sense.”

— Tahereh Mafi

465. “His smile is a vat of acid seeping into my skin.”

— Tahereh Mafi

466. “My eyes are 2 professional pickpockets, stealing everything to store away in my mind.”

— Tahereh Mafi

467. “Ah, Ms. Ferrars. I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by sitting in the corner.”

— Tahereh Mafi

468. “I worry that my sadness will be interpreted as an endorsement of his choices – of his very existence – and in this matter I don’t want to be misunderstood, so I cannot admit that I grieve him, that I care at all for the loss of this monstrous man who raised me. And in the absence of healthy action I remain frozen, a sentient stone in the wake of my father’s death.”

— Tahereh Mafi

469. “I do know that I don’t want to wake him. We were up very late last night.”

— Tahereh Mafi

470. “I want to fall asleep to the sound of his heart beating in the atmosphere.”

— Tahereh Mafi

471. “Uh, yeah – how about a warm hell no to that request? Does that work for you? Because it works for me.”

— Tahereh Mafi

472. “10,000 tiny particles shatter between us.”

— Tahereh Mafi

473. “My body has gotten so used to hunger that I don’t know how to recognize it anymore.”

— Tahereh Mafi

474. “Right now I feel certain that my imagination is much more dangerous than any of his truths.”

— Tahereh Mafi

475. “These words are vomit.”

— Tahereh Mafi

476. “Now, I’ll be on my way, thank you very much. It was awful talking to you.”

— Tahereh Mafi

477. “I want to be the bird that flies away.”

— Tahereh Mafi

478. “Studies have shown that thinking and wondering lead to thoughtful decision-making. It’s an epidemic.”

— Tahereh Mafi

479. “He likes to let a lot of people in; I like to keep most people out.”

— Tahereh Mafi

480. “How very important and infuriating it is to have to remind a smart person not to be so stupid as to give up on themselves.”

— Tahereh Mafi

481. “But now Warner’s eyes are moving, studying me. He looks at me with such intensity I wonder if he’s even aware he’s doing it. I wonder if he knows that when he looks at me like that I can feel it as acutely as if his bare skin were pressed against my own, that it does things to me when he looks at me like that and it makes me crazy.”

— Tahereh Mafi

482. “Take me back,” I tell him, shifting a little. The world tilts and steadies all at once. “Alert the medics and have a bed prepared for our arrival. In the meantime, elevate my arm and continue applying direct pressure to the wound. The bullet has broken or fractured something, and this will require surgery.”

— Tahereh Mafi

483. “Oliver felt much more than sorry for Alice. His heart had grown ten sizes since he’d met her, and the hours he’d lost her had nearly broken him.”

— Tahereh Mafi

484. “You,” he says to me, his hands gripping me tighter now, “are one of the bravest, strongest people I’ve ever met. You have the best heart, the best intentions – ” He stops. Takes a tight, shaky breath. “You’re the best person I’ve ever known,” he says to me. “You’ve been through the worst possible experiences and you survived with your humanity still intact. How the hell,” he says, his voice breaking now, “am I supposed to let go of you? How can I walk away from you?”

— Tahereh Mafi

485. “There’s nothing wrong with you that isn’t already wrong with me.”

— Tahereh Mafi

486. “I was a coward who needed someone to tell me i was worth something before i took any steps to save myself.”

— Tahereh Mafi

487. “Still, we took what we could get. We were wrapped up in each other, feeling happy and sad all at once, pretty much all the time.”

— Tahereh Mafi

488. “Is it possible to love someone and then stop loving them? I don’t know I even know what love is.”

— Tahereh Mafi

489. “I felt then, in that moment, the insubstantial weight of my sixteen years in a way I’d never felt before. I had no control here. No power. I didn’t even have my driver’s license. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have my own bank account. There was nothing I could do. Nothing I could do to help, to make this better. I had no connections in the world, no voice anyone would listen to. I felt at once everything, everything, and nothing at all.”

— Tahereh Mafi

490. “I hate myself for enjoying it. I.”

— Tahereh Mafi

491. “Swallow the tears back often enough and they’ll start feeling like acid dripping down your throat.”

— Tahereh Mafi

492. “I chained the terrified little girl of my past in some unknowable dungeon inside of me where she and her fears had been carefully stored, sealed away. Her memories, suffocated. Her anger, ignore. I do not speak to her. I don’t dare look in her direction. I hate her. But right now I can hear her crying.”

— Tahereh Mafi

493. “You’ve got a sexy voice. Makes everything sound naughty.”

— Tahereh Mafi

494. “I’m going to marry you today. And then I’m going to make love to you until you can’t remember your name.”

— Tahereh Mafi

495. “Alice had a heart of silk and a spine of steel;.”

— Tahereh Mafi

496. “It was so hard for Ocean to stomach that the world was filled with such awful people. I tried to tell him that the bigots and the racists had always been there, and he said he’d honestly never seen them like this, that he never thought they could be like this, and I said yes, I know. I said that’s how privilege works.”

— Tahereh Mafi

497. “Because it’s so difficult to fight what you cannot control and right now I can’t even control my own imagination as it grips my hair and drags me into the dark.”

— Tahereh Mafi

498. “Kenji looks like he might be choking. “A cartoon?” he says, outraged. “Tangled is not a cartoon. Tangled is one of the greatest movies of all time. It’s about fighting for freedom and true love.”

— Tahereh Mafi

499. “I have a great fear of drowning in the ocean of my own silence. In the steady thrum that accompanies quiet, my mind is unkind to me. I think too much. I feel, perhaps, far more than I should.”

— Tahereh Mafi

500. “I have never claimed to live by any set of principles,” Warner says to me. “I’ve never claimed to be right, or good, or even justified in my actions. I have been forced to do terrible things in my life, love, and I am seeking neither your forgiveness nor your approval. Because I do not have the luxury of philosophizing over scruples when I’m forced to act on basic instinct every day.”

— Tahereh Mafi