Top 500 Tahereh Mafi Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Because Warner is beautiful in ways even Adam isn’t.”

— Tahereh Mafi

302. “I close my eyes and focus on breathing. ‘You can talk to me. Just don’t touch me.’ 7 seconds of silence join the conversation. ‘Maybe I want to touch you.”

— Tahereh Mafi

303. “My heart is a field of lilies blooming under a pane of glass, pitter-pattering to life like a rush of raindrops.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

305. “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

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

— Tahereh Mafi

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “I’m starving my stomach is a tortured pit of starvation I’m so hungry so hungry so hungry I can’t even imagine what real food must taste like.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

312. “I was tired of focusing on my anger. I was tired of focusing only on my memories of terrible people and the terrible things they’d said and done to me. I was tired of it. The darkness took up too much valuable real estate in my head.”

— Tahereh Mafi

313. “I had never, ever touched someone and felt like this: like I was holding electricity inside of me.”

— Tahereh Mafi

314. “I felt blind and deaf at the same time, like i was moving through a fog, and i realized then- as i realizd everytime something like this happened- that i was never as strong as i hope to be.”

— Tahereh Mafi

315. “Who says you can’t be cute and kick ass at the same time?” Kenji winks at me. “I do it every day.”

— Tahereh Mafi

316. “I need to cool off,” I tell him, trying to moderate my voice. I’ll be back to shave your head while you’re sleeping.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

318. “Grieve nothing in this transitory world.”

— Tahereh Mafi

319. “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

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

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

322. “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

323. “I need air. I need a new brain. I need to jump out a window and catch a ride with a dragon to a world far from here.”

— Tahereh Mafi

324. “I’m so thirsty I could inhale a waterfall.”

— Tahereh Mafi

325. “I’d rather be shot dead screaming for justice than die alone in a prison of my own making.”

— Tahereh Mafi

326. “I wanted to ask her so many questions but I didn’t because we don’t talk to people anymore because saying something would be stranger than saying nothing to a stranger.”

— Tahereh Mafi

327. “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

328. “Words are like seeds, I think, planted into our hearts at a tender age.”

— Tahereh Mafi

329. “We were killing ourselves by trying to stay alive. The weather, the plants, the animals, and our human survival are all inextricably linked. The natural elements were at war with one another because we abused our ecosystem. Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

331. “I will give no one the satisfaction of my death.”

— Tahereh Mafi

332. “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

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

— Tahereh Mafi

334. “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

335. “The darkness is like a black canvas punctured by a blunt knife, with beams of light peeking through.”

— Tahereh Mafi

336. “These are my soldiers. Standing single-file line in their assembly uniforms. Black shirts, black pants, black boots. No guns. Left fist pressed against their hearts.”

— Tahereh Mafi

337. “That’s how I knew, for example, that Private Seamus Fletcher, 45B-76423, was beating his wife and children every night.”

— Tahereh Mafi

338. “Everything seems to be catching up with me at once. My failures. My cowardice. My stupidity. Sometimes I’m just so tired of this life.”

— Tahereh Mafi

339. “We don’t have to do anything at all to die. We can hide in a cupboard under the stairs our whole life and it’ll still find us.”

— Tahereh Mafi

340. “I’m beginning to think of hope as a dangerous, terrifying thing.”

— Tahereh Mafi

341. “I could live here, I think. Live where gravity does not know my name. Here I am unbound, untethered by the chains of this life. I am a different body, a different shell, and my weight is carried by the hands of friends. So many nights I’ve wished I could fall asleep under this sheet.”

— Tahereh Mafi

342. “Everything I want to say and everything I’ve wished to say begins to take shape, falling to the floor and scrambling upright. Paragraphs and paragraphs begin building walls around me, blocking and justifying as they find ways to fit together, linking and weaving and leaving no room for escape. And every single space between every unspoken word clambers up and into my open mouth, down my throat and into my chest, filling me with so much emptiness I think I might just float away.”

— Tahereh Mafi

343. “I am a whisper that never was.”

— Tahereh Mafi

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

— Tahereh Mafi

345. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. I feel off, unbalanced. Aching for something. I’m losing sight of my purpose, my sense of direction. I always tell myself that I’m fighting every day for hope, for the salvation of humanity, but every time I survive only to return to yet more loss and devastation, something comes loose inside of me. It’s like the people and places I love are the nuts and bolts keeping me upright; without them, I’m just scrap metal.”

— Tahereh Mafi

346. “I feel so shy so suddenly. So blind, so unnecessarily bold.”

— Tahereh Mafi

347. “Alice jumped from flagstone to flagstone, her face caught in the rainlight glow, her hand grasping for a touch of gold. The towns excitement was contagious, and the air was so thick with promise Alice could almost bite into it.”

— Tahereh Mafi

348. “The darkness is choking me.”

— Tahereh Mafi

349. “We were killing ourselves by trying to stay alive.”

— Tahereh Mafi

350. “It’s not the pain that’s unendurable. It’s the hopelessness. It’s the hopelessness that makes you reckless.”

— Tahereh Mafi