Everything Sad Is Untrue Quotes

Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?" A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.

Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead.

What you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.

Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.

A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered...And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything...Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love....God should be both. If a god isn't, that is no God.

But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw.

To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose. The hope that in this world, there are magical fish who will give you advice and warning, when really, the future is unknowable and infinitely dangerous.

Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do. You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.

Is everything sad going to come untrue?

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for.

Memories are always partly untrue.

The legend of my mom is that she can’t be stopped. Not when you hit her. Not when a whole country full of goons puts her in a cage. Not even if you make her poor and try to kill her slowly in the little-by-little poison of sadness. And the legend is true. I think because she’s fixed her eyes on something beyond the rivers of blood, to a beautiful place on the other side. How else would anybody do it?

Sometimes you just want somebody to look at a thing with you and say, “Yes. That is a thing you’re looking at. You haven’t lied to yourself.

Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last. Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.

Memories are tricky things. They can fade or fester. You have to seal them up tight like pickles and keep out impurities like how hurt you feel when you open them. Or they'll ferment and poison your brain.

The lesson here is that your happiest memories can become your saddest all of a sudden.

Never believe that villains are hurting people by accident. They want to get better at their craft of breaking jaws just as you want to get better at art or music.

Here is something I would like to tell you—stories get better as they get more true.

But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend.

Maybe we get the endings we deserve. Or maybe the endings we practice.

A patchwork story is the shame of a refugee.

Maybe there isn’t just one person designated for everybody. Maybe there’s a lot more to it---maybe you choose and you practice, and that’s what makes the love true.

When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things: 1.  The streets were not paved with gold. 2.  The streets were not paved at all. 3.  They were the ones expected to do the paving.

I think He’s a God who listens as if we are his most important children, and I think He speaks to tell us so.

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop,

Just after the climax of the trilogy The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead (as he thought) but alive. He cries, “I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself! Is everything sad going to come untrue?” The answer of Christianity to that question is—yes. Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.

I just wonder if they've had that feeling too. The one where you realize it's your fault that something beautiful is dead. And you know you weren't worth the trouble.

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away. I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do. And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.

Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing?

The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.

We are always choosing situations that hurt us. We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us. And then we think, what a horrible world that makes a weapon out of love. That stabs you with it, even when you can’t defend yourself and the other person hates you and wants to see you cry.

Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you've never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it's a loving thing to do. You speak someone else's words to yourself, and hear them for the first time. What you're doing now is listening to me, in the parlor of your mind, but also speaking to yourself, thinking about the parts of me you like or the parts that aren't funny enough. You evaluate, like Mrs. Miller says. You think and wrestle with every word.

To lose something you never had can be just as painful -- because it is the hope of having it that you lose.

But she doesn't understand that people are immune to the happiness of others too, not just their pain. They're numb to everything.

It's a miracle that anyone would ever fall in love with someone else and - of all the people in the world - that person loves them back. Like if you fell off a building and landed in a pillow truck, somehow.

I don't know how my mom was so unstoppable despite all that stuff happening. I dunno. Maybe it's anticipation. Hope. The anticipation that the God who listens in love will one day speak justice. The hope that some final fantasy will come to pass that will make everything sad untrue.

Imagine you're evil. Not misunderstood. Not sad. But evil. Imagine you've got a heart that spends all day wanting more. Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity. Imagine you're like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers. Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria. Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey. Imagine you're evil and you don't do any of those things, but you're like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what's going on and you say nothing's going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English. Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you're disgusted, because you don't like meanness. But you don't do anything or tell anyone. Imagine how much you've got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it. Suddenly evil isn't punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it's all that stuff you've left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.

Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.

If we can just rise to the challenge of communication--here in the parlor of your mind--we can maybe reach across time and space and every ordinary thing to see so deep into the heart of each other that you might agree that I am like you.

everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you’re not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing?

We don’t owe anyone our sadness, but the sharing of it is what friends do. It makes the sadness less. Friends don’t care if you like the same football squad.

Somehow, in all the world, with all the people in it, in all their wonky shapes, they were shaped to fit each other.

Can God create a mountain so big that He himself couldn’t lift it? It’s trying to put God in a corner, because if He can or if He can’t, He’s not all-powerful. But the question is silly, because it assumes God is as stupid as we are. If you’re as big as God, there’s no such thing as “lifting.” It’s all just floating in a million universes you made. If you made an object of some insane, unusual size, then it’d still be a thing. And God is as big as everything at once. And as small. Physical stuff is too simple. The better question is, Can God create a law so big that He himself has to obey it? Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.

Persians aren’t liars. They’re poets, which is worse. Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.

I am ugly and I speak funny. I am poor. My clothes are used and my food smells bad. I pick my nose. I don’t know the jokes and stories you like, or the rules to the games. I don’t know what anybody wants from me. But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend.

Is everything sad going to come untrue?' asks Sam[wise Gamgee]. Here we find, beyond all imagination, the deepest source of hope for the human story. For when the King is revealed, 'there will be no more night.' The Shadow will finally and forever be lifted from the earth. The Great War will be won. This King, who brings strength and healing in His hands, will make everything sad come untrue.

Imagine how much you’ve got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it. Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all the stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could’ve given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.

And whenever you look back and realize something was the last of something - like the last moment you ever saw your grandfather's house or the smell of the street you lived on or Orich bars or whatever - it can be an ordinary thing, but it also becomes the only thing you have, the clearest memory, and it gains all this extra meaning.

We don’t live in the heroic age. Our separation isn’t some great poetic struggle. It’s just pain. It’s just ripping bodies apart.

Sometimes you just want somebody to look at a thing with you and say, "Yes. That is a thing you're looking at. You haven't lied to yourself.

You can’t waste time with dignity.

A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other--if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen--then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren't the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

In all our lives, my sister only told me her stories twice. We never compared our memories, ever. I think because where they were the same, they were painful and obvious. And where they were different--even just a little--they were so important to each of us, that we hated each other for not remembering them as we did.

My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime. That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister. And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you. When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true. We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.

I won't tell you about her yet, because sometimes love has to be kept secret. If other people find out, they will attack it.

One, every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.

We don’t owe anyone our sadness, but the sharing of it is what friends do. It makes the sadness less.

One, every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive. And two, the story of Aziz could have gone a million different ways.

In America they distrust unhappy people.

God should be both. If a god isn’t, that is no God.

a patchwork text is the shame of a refugee.

You don’t get to choose what you remember.

Those pains are pains that make me strong. I imagine the more they bleed me, the more I become like jerked meat—a dried bull, a hard leather.

you either get the truth, or you get good news—you don’t often get both.

Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.

Her name was Karen and Karen was kind in the way that people can be, when kindness doesn't cost them anything.

The truth is that’s why I’m writing all this. Behind me is the elemental fiend of my memories crumbling into powder. I watch an arm disintegrate and instantly forget what was there.

All Persians are liars and lying is a sin. That's what the kids in Mrs. Miller's class think, but I'm the only Persian they've ever met, so I don't know where they got that idea. My mom says it's true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn't. Persians aren't liars. They're poets, which is worse. Poets don't even know when they're lying. They're just trying to remember their dreams. They're trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told. In one version, maybe I'm not the refugee kid in the back of Mrs. Miller's class. I'm a prince in disguise. If you catch me, I will say what they say in the 1,001 Nights. "Let me go, and I will tell you a tale passing strange." That's how they all begin. With a promise. If you listen, I'll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we're not enemies anymore.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

YOU KNOW WHY I told you all those poop stories. Because food and poop are the truest things about you. I walked past the bathroom once when Kelly J. was walking out and the smell was so foul and sour it was like she could never hide her rotten insides, no matter how pretty she is.

But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane.

I heard this once: When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things: 1. The streets were not paved with gold. 2. The streets were not paved at all. 3. They were the ones expected to do the paving.

And sometimes you fall in love that way, when you’re drowning in a world of pain. It’s not a happy love. It’s just whoever manages not to hurt you all the time. You think they must be the best the world has to offer. The little window of time you aren’t in pain can seem like happiness.

At church potlucks they play a secret game of dumping random cans of food in casserole dishes and pretending their grandmothers gave them the recipe. Jell-O is their favorite. Campbell’s mushroom Jell-O goes on everything. So does Velveeta, which is a cheese Jell-O that only sort of hardens.

On the Day of the Lord—the day that God makes everything right, the day that everything sad comes untrue—on that day the same thing will happen to your own hurts and sadness. You will find that the worst things that have ever happened to you will in the end only enhance your eternal delight. On that day, all of it will be turned inside out and you will know joy beyond the walls of the world. The joy of your glory will be that much greater for every scar you bear. So live in the light of the resurrection and renewal of this world, and of yourself, in a glorious, never-ending, joyful dance of grace.

When I was a kid in Isfahan, I would tell my mother that someday, I would build her a castle at the top of Mount Sofeh. I could see it from my window. A castle in the sky. I didn’t know that life would make a liar out of me. I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t forget. I just never managed it. I wrote you a book instead. I know it isn’t even close.

HERE IS A LIST of foods we discovered in America: Peanut butter. Marshmallows. Barbecue sauce. (You can say, “Can I have BBQ?” to a kid’s mom at potlucks and they’ll know what you mean.) Puppy chow. (Chex cereal covered in melted chocolate and peanut butter and tossed in powdered sugar. They only give it if you win a Valentine friend.) Corn-chip pie (not a pie). (Chili on top of corn chips with cheese and sour cream (not sour).) Some mores. (They say it super fast like s’mores.) Banana puddin. (They don’t say the g. Sometimes they don’t even say the b.) Here is a list of the foods from Iran that they have never heard of here: All of it. All the food. Jared Rhodes didn’t even know what a date was.

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away.

Tolkien captures the mood we will have when we at last awaken to that day, when Sam wakes up after completing his quest, exclaiming: “At last he gasped: ‘Gandalf? I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”3 I can quite imagine a lot of crying going on, on the part of all of us, as we realize that all we were able to dream of was but just a shadow of the reality of heaven.

I squinted at every dappled leaf in the mulberry wood, hoping to see leopard eyes looking back. Imagine how unlikely it is for two creatures of any kind to see each other—through the shadows of the woods—eyes connecting, attention ready. For a moment like that all the universe would have to conspire to move all its pieces and line them up just so. I think a person gets seen, really looked at, looked into, seen the way a leopard would see into you, maybe ten times in their entire life.

The history of the clown’s underpants is a secret history and I will never tell it. But if you think people are stupid and mazloom, and all you ever do is take from them then they eventually learn how to survive you. They learn to hide away everything they love where you can’t touch and they won’t just hide it some place easy to find like a clown’s pockets or any place in this world. They’ll create a new world with its own language and they’ll hide everything there. All the favorite jokes they won’t say around you. All the best books. The spot on the wall that looks like a keyhole. Being safe and free and comfortable. All those things, and you won’t even know they exist. And when you've gotten your hands on the one orange and you’ve laughed at the badly hidden tears. You won’t even know there was a secret zipper in a bus pillow where the rest of the bars were really hidden. Not some obvious clown. You won’t know because you believe the weak can’t do anything. But hiding is something you do when you wait to get stronger.

But the truth is that no one is innocent in love, and nobody forced me to love Kelly J. I don’t want to stop just because she laughs at me. I want to stay in love with her until she realizes I am a person. It is a complicated thing that a little kid, or even a fifth grader, can’t understand, that we are always choosing situations that hurt us. We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us. And then we think, what a horrible world that makes a weapon out of love. That stabs you with it, even when you can't defend yourself and the other person hates you and wants to see you cry. It's a miracle that anyone would ever fall in love with someone else and--of all the people in the world--that person loves them back. Like if you fell off a building and landed in a pillow truck, somehow. It doesn't happen, basically. Which means we end up with someone and there's a lot of choosing to do. Choosing to forgive strange smells or choosing that Gadzooks is not the only place that boyfriends can shop. This is the work of love.

Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. you are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!? - think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin's and Pater's heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new - the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening?

Can God create a mountain so big that He himself couldn’t lift it? It’s trying to put God in a corner, because if He can or if He can’t, He’s not all-powerful. But the question is silly, because it assumes God is as stupid as we are. If you’re as big as God, there’s no such thing as “lifting.” It’s all just floating in a million universes you made. If you made an object of some insane, unusual size, then it’d still be a thing. And God is as big as everything at once. And as small. Physical stuff is too simple. The better question is, Can God create a law so big that He himself has to obey it? Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.

Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks?” Be careful with the answer. It’s as important as every word from Scheherazade’s mouth that saved her life. And everybody’s got an answer. A god who listens is like your best friend, who lets you tell him about all the people you don’t like. A god who speaks is like your best teacher, who tells Brandon Goff he has to leave the room if he’s going to call people falafel monkeys. A god who listens is your mom who lets you sit in a kitchen and tell her stories about castles in the mountains. A god who speaks is your dad who calls on the phone with advice for your life in America. There are gods all over the world who just want you to express yourself. Look inside and find whatever you think you are and that’s all it takes to be good. And there are gods who are so alien to us, with minds so clear, the only thing to do would be to sit at their feet and wait for them to speak, to tell us what is good. A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything. I don’t have an answer for you. This is the kind of thing you live your whole life thinking about probably. Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love. Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious, the answer is both. God should be both. If a god isn't, that is no God.

You know it’ll be a year or more before anything happens. It’s going to be a tough year. But for the person who thinks, “At the end of this year, I’m going somewhere to be free, a place without secret police, free to believe whatever I want and teach my children.” And you believe it’ll be hard, but eventually, you’ll build a whole new life—that’s like winning the lottery. It’s like saying you’ll get one hundred million dollars at the end of the year. But if you’re thinking every place is the same, and there will always be people who abuse you, and about how poor you’ll be at first. The sadness overtakes you; it’s like saying you’ll get a soup and a sandwich at the end of the year, and that’s it. Here’s the thing, you’ll both have the same year at Hotel Barba. But one of you will be looking around with joy and anticipation, wondering what you can do to prepare your kids for the new world. And the other will be slumped in the courtyard, surrendered to the idea that it’s all one long river of blood. I don’t know which belief is true—nobody does. But what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present. That’s how she did it.

But just cause they don’t have something in English doesn’t mean they don’t have it in England, know what I mean?

The thing is that Scheherazade was telling her stories to a king in the language they both spoke as babies. So she never had to explain the demons who believe in God, or what was rude. She just showed it in the story. But the shame of refugees is that we have to constantly explain ourselves. It makes the stories patchworks.

She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed.

I put down Mr. Sheep Sheep. He props up on the dirt on a flat-panel bottom. His stubby round legs poke out in front of him. His arms reach out for a hug. I look in his black button eyes. They beg.

Here in Oklahoma, I understand why - why humans would sit behind a glass window and look in the faces of families running away from danger and dead sheep, and not feel anything. They think we're bad people who will come and take their stuff.

My dad said some medical stuff like, "We gave him eight hundred milligrams of boppity-boop-boop in the car.

If anyone had thought that Hansen was going to give a straightforward confession, they had been sadly disabused of that notion. They had come to that vexing axiom: If a subject is lying, but not lying all the time, everything he says is untrue, since there is no reliable way to tell when the person is lying and when he’s telling the truth. To challenge Hansen, they were going to have to find a way to attack the known, or strongly suspected, weaknesses in his story. That had to start, it seemed, with a full accounting of the number of victims.  

Scott doesn’t suspect anything, right?” I ask. “Are you kidding? He knows pretty much everything,” Travis says as if there was ever a doubt. “What? Did you tell him?” I accuse. “Etty, he’s turning thirty. He’d have to be a moron to not know there is going to be a party. You always order food from the same place, and we both live in a shoe box, so your parents’ house is the only place that could fit more than five people. It didn’t take Einstein.” I chew on my bottom lip. “We will have to do something spontaneous,” I say, nodding my head. “Slow down,” he says, holding up his hands. “Don’t go crazy. The party we planned is fine.” Why does everyone always say that to me? Like they think I go overboard on everything. Which is so untrue. Everything I plan is with love, and I am in complete control the whole time. It’s the plans that have a mind of their own. I mean, did I ask the magician to put my mom in that box for his ‘Disappearing Trick’ even though my mother’s claustrophobic? No. And after I calmed her down and she drank a bottle of wine I think even she appreciated that it was a pretty cool trick. And my dad fumbling with the keys to get her unlocked and punching out the magician− it was so romantic. Sadly, I did lose my security deposit on that one.

Little by little

A man can hold two hearts in the same hand and not let them touch.

And so the bitterness fermented in its jar in the dark cellars of their minds.

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble.

Stories are stories. Life is life. They kiss and they marry, but they die alone.

Memories are tricky things. They can fade or fester. You have to seal them up tight like pickles and keep out impurities like how hurt you feel when you open them. Or they’ll ferment and poison your brain.

But what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened. —Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I didn’t say anything to my dad. It’s not like he could do anything but talk on the phone anyway. We don’t live in the heroic age. Our separation isn’t any great poetic struggle. It’s just pain. It’s just ripping bodies apart.

To lose something you never had can be just as painful — because it is the hope of having it that you lose.

I used to believe that you could not choose who you love any more than you could choose the picture on a used shirt. But the truth is that no one is innocent in love…

That’s what forgetting your grandpa’s face feels like. There’s no good in it. Nothing to gain but nothing. A piece of your heart makes a sound like a groan and disappears. Then you poke at it sometimes, trying to remember what was there by the shape of the hole. That’s it. You are less.

Here is an interesting question that I heard once in church. Can God create a mountain so big He himself couldn’t lift it? It’s trying to put God in a corner, because if He can or if He can’t, He’s not all-powerful. But the question is silly, because it assumes God is as stupid as we are. If you’re as big as God, there’s no such thing as “lifting”. It’s all just floating in a million universes you made. If you made an object of some insane, unusual size, then it’d still be a thing. And God is as big as everything at once. And as small. Physical stuff is too simple. The better question is, Can God create a law so big that he himself has to obey it? Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.

Maybe there isn’t just one person designated for everybody. Maybe there’s a lot more to it — maybe you choose and you practice, and that’s what makes the love true.

But who begat you is a question with an answer only someone else can tell you. You’re born, and when you’re old enough to understand, they tell you whose child you are. You get claimed. That’s when you’re born again into something—not the world, but the word, the family name. It’s the most important thing about you, whose you are. It’s more important than your race or religion. It’s more important than what shows you like. It’s the part of you that talks to itself so late at night that you’re not even sure you’re awake. It’s the concentrated you, collected in a pool of genetic fluids, creative juice, carbonic goo, passions, past mistakes, memories of other people, opinions about sweets, the intense desire to visit Italy, habits, the smell of your fart—all together in a thick maple syrup of your human situation. Your blood. That’s you. The truest thing about you.

I just remember that one thing. I never knew if either of them got what they wanted from me. I realize maybe those aren’t even two different memories. Maybe I gave the memory of the stranger to my grandpa so he’d have a good one. Or just blurred them a little into each other. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks?

A god who listens is like your best friend, who lets you tell him about all the people you don’t like. A god who speaks is like your best teacher, who tells Brandon Goff he has to leave the room if he’s going to call people falafel monkeys.

A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything. I don’t have an answer for you. This is the kind of thing you live your whole life thinking about probably. Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love.

OH, AND IN CASE IT wasn’t obvious, the answer is both. God should be both. If a god isn’t, that is no God.

in Persia, they would say King Fereydun shined with the light of greatness and wisdom, and people would have to cover their eyes when they saw him. Which is where salutes come from.

people are immune to the happiness of others too, not just their pain. They’re numb to everything. They don’t even see her.

When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things: The streets were not paved with gold. The streets were not paved at all. They were the ones expected to do the paving.

My very first memory is blood, slopping from the throat of a terrified bull, and my grandfather—red-handed—reaching for my face. I would have been three at this time. Maybe I have memories before that. I don’t know. If I did, they’d be flashes of tile patterns, or something. I can make it up, if you want.

The drive would have happened before I saw Baba Haji slaughter the bull, but I’m not certain. The cake could have been rose and honey. My mom could have said, “Akh, Masoud, not this again.” His mom could have made kebab and yogurt. But those aren’t differences that make a difference.

Eventually I said, "Do you remember Baba Haji?" And she said, "Of course." "No," I said. "Do you remember the time I was a kid. I walked around into his courtyard, and there was a bull they wanted to kill for a feast for me. All the mean were struggling with it. Is that real? Did that happen?" I was terrified of what she'd say, because all this time, I had held on to that one memory like a peach pit in my pocket. It was mine and it was the only I had of my Baba Haji. Is it was untrue, I don't think I could take it. "No," she said. "It wasn't like that." I closed my eyes, because I had lost my Baba Haji. "That wasn't for a feast for you. The bull had gone mad," she said. "It was going to kick someone or kill one of the farmers. So they went to your Baba Haji. He was so strong, they all went to him for this kind of thing. He took care of everyone who worked of him. And it was a mercy to kill the bull, because it would thrash and break its own neck if they didn't." "Really?" I said. "And did he come out and hold my face?" "I suppose so." "And were his hands red with blood?" "Oh no. He would never have done that. You must have imagined that." "But he smiled at me." "Of course. You were his. He would have also made a feast," she added. "But it would have been a sheep. He would have spilled the blood. You have to understand that means a blessing. It's ancient. To step over the river of blood, to accept the sacrifice and be thankful. Then we could eat, only after we understand the cost of joy. And he would have washed his hands.

The first thing I read are comics about Calvin and Hobbes. He is a boy who seems to hate the world as it is and love the world that ought to be. The tiger is his sane mind, which goes to sleep too much, so that he never knows what to believe. And never knows which world he is in. I like him because he speaks better than a kid.

In America they distrust happy people.

When your weary bones, tired feet, and broken heart feel like giving up, remember that God is-- at this very minute-- preparing for your future with Him, where He will make all things new, and everything sad comes untrue.

The lesson here is that if you watch the side characters in a love story, you might notice the lovers treating them like garbage, with the excuse that they're doing it for love. But another lesson might be that maybe you're not the hero of every story, and maybe Farhad was Shirin's true love, or maybe there isn't just one person designated for everybody. Maybe there's a lot more to it--maybe you choose and you practice and that's what makes the love true.

And the lesson here is that people are unlikeable. They have the irritating habit of believing they are as important as you are to the story.

The lesson here us that people have scales in their heads and they measure other people for their value and ugly refugee boys are near the bottom and pretty blond girls are at the top. This is not a happy lesson. But you either get the truth, or you get good news--you don't often get both.

You'd be shocked how few people want what you want.

Another way to say it is that everybody is dying and going to die of something. And if you're not spending your life on the stuff you believe, then what are you even doing? What is the point of the whole thing? It's a tough question, because most people haven't picked anything worthwhile.

We hated waiting for grownies to talk about eternity. It seemed so obvious that everything was already eternal. That something made all of it. Something that loved and was beautiful and was cosmically and royally ticked off with what everyone was up to.

And the mind can do anything. It can create anything. It is God, Khosrou. The mind is God.

The classroom was a cement cube. But it had streamers and wavy cardboard on the walls, and posters about kindness that really mean calmness.

In a refugee camp, it's the waiting that will kill you. The whole point of a refugee camp is that there are actual people trying to kill you. But really, it's the slow numbing death of hopelessness that does it. You have to imagine a room that's just a cement cube--nothing beautiful in it. If you're not careful, this is also what becomes of the parlor of your mind.

Memories are just stories we tell ourselves, after all. What if we are telling ourselves lies? I don't know.

Most things were against the rules, so when one old lady across the hall from us fell in her shower, we couldn't do anything but steal cinder blocks from the courtyard and arrange them in her bathroom so she could sit as she washed. In situations like that, God doesn't mind stealing. Or maybe he does, but you get more positive points for helping the old lady who was so happy she cried and kissed my cheeks so hard she rubbed tears all over them. Or, wait, okay, actually, I think the point is that above all other laws is the law of love. I forgot that one for a second.

The closer you get to history, it's like the closer you get to the weave of a rug. You see a thousand thousand complications.

Maybe half-good is as good as it gets in this life. And maybe that's why my mom was so interested in the next one.

I said to my dad, "Are you really a Christian now?" And he said, "Yes!" and laughed. "I'm your father. I am humanity. I'm everything to everybody." I didn't say anything after that. I guess that was my dad's favorite myth, that he was everything to everybody.

But that was the moment I realized that myths are just legends that everybody agrees on, and legends are just stories that got bigger over time.

Maybe I should thank him for showing me that any power of one person over another is built on the threat of violence. But there must be some middle step when people disagree, before they try to rip each other apart. Right?

Here in Oklahoma, I understand why--why humans would sit behind a glass window and look in the faces of families running away from danger and dead sheep, and not feel anything. They think we're bad people who will come and take their stuff. Like when I won the tetherball tournament at recess against Trevor and I wouldn't have if I hadn't been there at all.

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away. I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do. And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.

My mom just sighs and says, "It was a different time," and he was a young man, but nobody's convinced, not even her. What else is there to say, though? It happened. Welcome to earth.

Ellie had a lot of sadness in her life. Sadness of the kind that makes perfectly normal people into poets.

The kid is probably giggling like a villain. He's giving every sign that he's going to hurt her. And she is genuinely hoping he's going to play with her. It's beautiful. How badly we all want love. It's tragic. How bad we are at searching for it.

My mom comes home exhausted every night. I have never seen her not exhausted. And also, I have never seen her not working. People in Oklahoma think this must be how refugees are--never sitting, never sleeping, like they have no knees and no dreams. Maybe people think that's just the way my mom talks, kinda panicky and chipper at the same time, like someone scared who doesn't want you to think she's scared--even maybe like you're the one she's scared of.

Oklahoma is beautiful sometimes. People who are kind and feed poor kids are always beautiful.

At school I don't tell anyone about church. At church I don't tell anyone about home. The neighborhood kids don't know anything about anything else. The trick is to keep your stories to yourself, so they can't use them against you.

In Iran, when a guest comes, you tell them they may be angels, they are welcome and the whole house is filled with the joy of their presence. And the person always apologizing is the host, that they might have more to offer. But here, it seems guests are supposed to apologize all the time that they're taking anything. It's like they think the host is burdened. I don't understand it. But I know I never want to go to the house of any of these grown-ups, who make you beg for so little. I don't want the cracker sandwiches they made with all the groaning in their hearts. I don't want to be poor. But if I can't have that, then I don't want them to know how hungry I am.

I walk home alone by the main road so the cars will see me. Sometimes the grown-ups driving by will call the police, but it's okay because I don't do drugs or spray paints. Walking through the woods is more dangerous because there are no adults in the woods, just other kids. And kids are dangerous.

People are like that. They're immune to the sadness of others.

And then he might say, "A man can hold two hearts in the same hand and not let them touch." And if you asked him what that meant, he would just tell you he needed to get back to work.

In any story the two hardest things to be are a widow or an orphan. Those are the bad cards to draw from the deck marked "life." Because those are the two moments the people you love the most die. It's heart break. Heart shatter. Heart starve. It's so much loss that it's easier if you just died and started the game over. But you can't. You have to wander. Part of it is losing your tribe and being homeless. Part of it is being alone in the dark. I won't lie to you. The deck marked "life" is stacked full of bum cards.

They started talking--I have no idea what about. Grownies will talk sometimes in boring words about boring ideas to groom each other like apes, to let each other know they're pals.

I squinted at every dappled leaf in the mulberry wood, hoping to see leopard eyes looking back. Imagine how unlikely it is for two creatures of any kind to see each other--through the shadows of the woods--eyes connecting, attention ready. For a moment like that all the universe would have to conspire to move all its pieces and line them up just so. I think a person gets seen, really looked at, looked into, seen the way a leopard would see into you, maybe ten times in their entire life. And even then, who knows what a leopard would be thinking.

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave