12 Quotes by Dina Nayeri

...sorrow isn't a devil's contract that you forge in the dark. Sometimes you trip and fall in.

Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. (...) But if you are born in the Third World and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

We became refugees.

And here is the biggest lie in the refugee crisis. It isn’t the faulty individual stories. It is the language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees – deluge or flood or swarm. These words are lies.

I am standing on a thin border between past and future. Waiting for madness to come.

Home is never the same for anyone not just refugees. You go back and find that you have grown and so has your country. Home is gone. It lives in the mind. Time exiles us all from our childhood.

The waiting began to take its toll. It’s a terrifying place. Pressure from the past, pressure from the future. They say too much of either is a mental illness. The future brings anxiety because you don’t belong and can’t move forward. The past brings depression because you can’t go home. Your memories fade and everything you know is gone.

The mystic Al-Ghazali said that the inhabitants of heaven remain forever thirty-three. It reminds me of Iran, stuck in 1976 in the imagination of every exile. Iranians often say that when they visit Tehran or Shiraz or Isfahan, they find even the smallest changes confusing and painful – a beloved corner shop gone to dust, the smell of bread that once filled a street, a rose garden neglected. In their memories, they always change it back. Iran is like an aging parent, they say.

In war, villainy and good change hands all the time, like a football.