Top 500 Tahereh Mafi Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “Having a cellmate might be okay. Talking to a real human being might make things easier. I practice using my voice, shaping my lips around the familiar words unfamiliar to my mouth. I practice all day. I’m surprised I remember how to speak.”

— Tahereh Mafi

452. “We’re so good at masking our hunger until the knocks at the door cripple our dignity.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

454. “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

455. “My eyes flick up to the pane of glass punched into the wall. Pinks and reds filter into the room and I know it’s the start of a new beginning. The start of the same end. Another day.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

457. “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

458. “My organs are dead, my bones are cracked, my skin is a sieve, punctured by pins and needles of pain.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

460. “I want a pocketful of punctuation marks to end the thoughts he’s forced into my head.”

— Tahereh Mafi

461. “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

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

— Tahereh Mafi

463. “How can I hate his anger,” he says, “when I know so well where it comes from?”

— Tahereh Mafi

464. “I tuck caution into my pocket and hope I can reach for it if I need to.”

— Tahereh Mafi

465. “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

466. “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

467. “Let go of me,” I scream, but, oh, only in my imagination because my lips are finished working and my heart has just expired and my mind has gone to hell for the day and my eyes my eyes I think they’re bleeding...”

— Tahereh Mafi

468. “These words are vomit.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

470. “My throat is a reptile, covered in scales.”

— Tahereh Mafi

471. “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

472. “He was their father, her husband, and the reason they all died a brutal, untimely death. And some days i wonder why I insist on keeping myself alive.”

— Tahereh Mafi

473. “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

474. “You’re a total catch.” “I know, right? I keep trying to tell people.”

— Tahereh Mafi

475. “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

476. “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

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

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

479. “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

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

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

482. “Arrogance is false confidence. It is born from insecurity. Haider pretends to be unafraid. He pretends to be crueler than he is. He lies easily. Than makes him unpredictable and, in som ways, a more dangerous opponent. But the majority of the time his actions are inspired by fear. And that makes him weak.”

— Tahereh Mafi

483. “Loving Father meant loving all of him – his open windows as well as his dusty corners – and she refused to love him less for secrets unknown. Alice had secrets, too, didn’t she? And she was beginning to realize that part of growing up meant growing tender, and that secrets were sometimes wrapped around tender things to keep them safe.”

— Tahereh Mafi

484. “My heart is flapping wings against my throat.”

— Tahereh Mafi

485. “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

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

— Tahereh Mafi

487. “You are a monster!”

— Tahereh Mafi

488. “I am a spectacle, an anomaly even among the anomalies.”

— Tahereh Mafi

489. “It’s raining. The world is weeping at our feet in anticipation of what we’re about to do.”

— Tahereh Mafi

490. “Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man.”

— Tahereh Mafi

491. “We breathe when we’re wrong, we breathe when we’re right, we breathe even as we slip off the ledge toward an early grave. It cannot be undone. So I breathe.”

— Tahereh Mafi

492. “I’m so happy I could cry. “It’s about time,” he says. But it’s not Adam who says it. Thirty-Nine There’s blood everywhere. Adam is on the ground, clutching his body, but I don’t know where he’s been shot.”

— Tahereh Mafi

493. “Suddenly she understood that it is a very hard thing, to be afraid of things, and that it takes up so much time. Suddenly she understood why Mother rarely got around to doing the dishes. “Does.”

— Tahereh Mafi

494. “Why must you look like the rest of us? Why do you have to be the one to change? Change the way we see. Don’t change the way you are.”

— Tahereh Mafi

495. “I can’t help but find it both painful and beautiful that Warner lost a mother and gained two brothers in the same week.”

— Tahereh Mafi

496. “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

497. “Compliments are not things I know how to process.”

— Tahereh Mafi

498. “And then she took it off, slipped it on my index finger, and said, ‘If you hide your heart, he will never be able to take it from you.”

— Tahereh Mafi

499. “You shot Adam,” are the only words I can think of. My mind is muddled with disbelief. I keep seeing his beautiful body crumpled on the ground, red red red. I need to know if he’s alive. He has to be alive. Warner’s eyes flash. “Kent is dead.” “No –.”

— Tahereh Mafi

500. “My eyes close in a subconscious effort to block out the bad memories, but the effort backfires. Protests. Rallies. Screams for survival. I see women and children starving to death, homes destroyed and buried in rubble, the countryside a burnt landscape, its only fruit the rotting flesh of casualties. I see dead dead dead red and burgundy and maroon and the richest shade of your mother’s favorite lipstick all smeared into the earth. So much everything all the things dead.”

— Tahereh Mafi