Marjane Satrapi Quotes

I wanted to be an educated, liberated woman. And if the pursuit of knowledge meant getting cancer, so be it.

In life you'll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it's because they're stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.

We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the crap we eat — not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it's AIDS. Before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there's the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of me going under a truck, that's fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don't want to eat me. F@#$ck the worms.

In retrospect, I can see that I had always known that it wouldn't between us. But after my pitiful love story in Vienna, I needed to believe in someone again...

I am the last prophet.
A woman?

To speak behind others' backs is the ventilator of the heart.

Life is too short to be lived badly.

Chouka era muy divertida. Por desgracia, cuando dos años más tarde se casó, su esposo le prohibió verme. Para él, yo era una persona amoral

Guns may shoot and knives may carve, but we won't wear your silly scarves!

You are putting yourself in serious danger...'

I think that I preferred to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for me. The shame of having become a mediocre nihilist.

My natural optimism just leads me to be skeptical.

If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me.

Certainly, they'd had to endure the war, but they had each other close by. They had never known the confusion of being a third-worlder, they had always a home!

What do you want me to say, sir? That I'm the vegetable that I refused to become, that I'm so disappointed in myself that I can no longee look at myself in the mirror? That I hate myself?

The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else's rules.