Top 500 Tahereh Mafi Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “We’re too different now. We want different things. And this?” I say nodding at our hands. “All this managed to prove is that you are extremely good at turning me off.”

— Tahereh Mafi

252. “I’m not sure. But there’s something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we’d never say in the light.”

— Tahereh Mafi

253. “There are secrets everywhere. Answers nowhere.”

— Tahereh Mafi

254. “I want to hurt people all the time,” he says. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night because I’m thinking about all the people I’d like to murder.”

— Tahereh Mafi

255. “My eyes are two professional pickpockets, stealing everything away in my mind. I lose track of the minutes we trample over.”

— Tahereh Mafi

256. “My mind is a maze of impossibility.”

— Tahereh Mafi

257. “No more Christmas, no more Hanukkah, no more Ramadan and Diwali.”

— Tahereh Mafi

258. “Good God, I have taken leave of my senses. I never thank Delalieu. I’ve likely given the poor man a heart attack.”

— Tahereh Mafi

259. “The afternoon our story begins, the quiet parts of being alive were the busiest: wind unlocking Windows; rainlight nudging curtains apart; fresh-cut grass tickling unsocked feet. Days like this made Alice want to set off on a great adventure.”

— Tahereh Mafi

260. “I’m an old creaky staircase when I wake up.”

— Tahereh Mafi

261. “My heart is a water balloon exploding in my chest.”

— Tahereh Mafi

262. “I just read anything I could find. Fairy tales and mysteries and history and poetry. It didn’t matter what it was. I would read it over and over and over again. The books, they helped keep me from losing my mind all together.”

— Tahereh Mafi

263. “He leans forward and I freeze. I thaw. I melt. “Juliette,” I whisper. “My name is Juliette.” His lips soften into a smile that cracks apart my spine. He repeats my name like the word amuses him. Entertains him. Delights him. In 17 years no one has said my name like that.”

— Tahereh Mafi

264. “I am suspended in the moment. Flickering images faded with age, frozen thoughts hovering precariously in dead space, a whirlwind of memories that slice through my soul.”

— Tahereh Mafi

265. “You’re a coward,” he whispers. “You want to be with me and it terrifies you. And you’re ashamed,” he says. “Ashamed you could ever want someone like me. Aren’t you?”

— Tahereh Mafi

266. “You have to get it together, girl, or you’re not going to get through this alive. You have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes or what the other commanders have in store for you. Lena won’t be the last of us to arrive here, you know. And no one is coming here to play nice.” “Good. Let them come.”

— Tahereh Mafi

267. “The only existence I know now is the one I was given. An echo of what used to be.”

— Tahereh Mafi

268. “This was my miserable choice. I brought it upon myself.”

— Tahereh Mafi

269. “Because in the end it is our emotions that make us weak, not our actions.”

— Tahereh Mafi

270. “Why sleep when there are books to read.”

— Tahereh Mafi

271. “I head straight into the living room, eager to put distance between me and whatever keeps happening to my head when Warner gets too close. I need air. I need a new brain. I need to jump out of a window and catch a ride with a dragon to a world far from here.”

— Tahereh Mafi

272. “I don’t have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don’t know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I’m a noun through and through.”

— Tahereh Mafi

273. “I love that the girl who blushes so easily in my arms is the same one who would kill a man for hurting me.”

— Tahereh Mafi

274. “And I pull her in, press my forehead to hers. “Those who do not understand you,” I say softly, “will always doubt you.”

— Tahereh Mafi

275. “I lived in a really dark place. I wasn’t safe in my own mind. I woke up every morning hoping to die and then spent the rest of the day wondering if maybe I was already dead because I couldn’t even tell the difference.”

— Tahereh Mafi

276. “Who’s Bruce Lee?” Kenji asks, horrified. “Oh my God. We can’t even be friends anymore.”

— Tahereh Mafi

277. “But I’m shocked by the tenderness in his voice. The sincerity with which he wants to know. He’s like a feral dog, crazed and wild, thirsty for chaos, simultaneously aching for recognition and acceptance. Love.”

— Tahereh Mafi

278. “I’m really paying attention to my surroundings. All of a sudden my senses feel sharper, clearer; my entire being feels like it’s humming with a renewed kind of energy. I am electric.”

— Tahereh Mafi

279. “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.”

— Tahereh Mafi

280. “We’ve been shattered and reconstructed, told to make an effort every single day to pretend we still function the way we’re supposed to. But it’s a lie, it’s all a lie; every person, place, thing and idea is a lie. I do not function properly. I am nothing more than the consequence of catastrophe.”

— Tahereh Mafi

281. “Try again,” he says slowly. “Stay calm. Have faith in yourself. If you don’t believe you can do it,” he says, “you won’t.”

— Tahereh Mafi

282. “My dreams are bloody and bleeding and blood is bleeding all over my mind and I can’t sleep anymore.”

— Tahereh Mafi

283. “Every single time you claim to understand even a fraction of what I’m feeling, I want to disembowel you. I want to sever your carotid artery. I want to rip out your vertebrae, one by one. You have no idea what it is to love her,” he says angrily. “You couldn’t even begin to imagine. So stop trying to understand.”

— Tahereh Mafi

284. “Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future.”

— Tahereh Mafi

285. “Every day we feel further apart. And sometimes I think the harder I try to hold on, the more she tries to break away.”

— Tahereh Mafi

286. “Beautiful enough to lure in prey, he said. Strong enough to clamp down and destroy, he said.”

— Tahereh Mafi

287. “And I can’t help but be amazed at the power such small, unassuming animals wield over us; they so easily break down our defenses.”

— Tahereh Mafi

288. “I would rather be dead, than go back to being silent and suffocated.”

— Tahereh Mafi

289. “My thoughts, I think, will soon be sound. My mind, I hope, will soon be found.”

— Tahereh Mafi

290. “And the stitches in my heart begin to pop. One by one.”

— Tahereh Mafi

291. “Your eyes are so deep. So calm. I want to know what you’re thinking.”

— Tahereh Mafi

292. “Friendship is not a thing I have ever experienced. Not as a child, and not as I am now.”

— Tahereh Mafi

293. “I often felt like a very old person trapped in a young person’s body.”

— Tahereh Mafi

294. “Grieve nothing in this transitory world.”

— Tahereh Mafi

295. “Ramadan was over. We celebrated, we exchanged gifts, and Navid devoured the contents of our entire kitchen.”

— Tahereh Mafi

296. “It didn’t matter how unaccented my English was. It didn’t matter that I told people, over and over again, that I was born here, in America, that English was my first language, that my cousins in Iran made fun of me for speaking mediocre Farsi with an American accent – it didn’t matter. Everyone assumed I was fresh off the boat from a foreign land.”

— Tahereh Mafi

297. “Different women felt comfortable in different outfits. They were all beautiful.”

— Tahereh Mafi

298. “Because Warner is beautiful in ways even Adam isn’t.”

— Tahereh Mafi

299. “I am a whisper that never was.”

— Tahereh Mafi

300. “I don’t consider myself a moral man. I do not philosophize about life or bother with laws and principles that govern most people. I do not pretend to know the difference between right and wrong. But I do live by a certain kind of code. And somethimes, I think, you have how to shoot first.”

— Tahereh Mafi