Darius the Great Is Not Okay Quotes

“When she was a baby, I tried to talk to Laleh in Farsi too. But I never really got the hang of it, and Mom’s friends kept correcting me, so after a while I kind of gave up. After that, me and Dad talked to Laleh exclusively in English. That left the two of us in the dark whenever we were at gatherings with Mom’s friends. That was the only time Dad and I were on the same team.”

″...love was and opportunity, not a burden.”

“The silence between us hung heavy with all the things we couldn’t say. All the things we knew without them being said out loud.”

“As a people group, Persians are genetically predisposed to like tea. And even though I was only half Persian, I had inherited a full-strength tea-loving gene sequence from my mom.”

″‘You don’t care what anyone thinks. You know?’ My ears burned. ‘I care what everyone thinks, Sohrab.’ ‘No you don’t. Not really. You don’t try to change yourself. You know who you are.‘”

“Your place was empty before. But this is your family. You belong here.”

“I was one tiny pulsar in a swirling, luminous galaxy of Iranians, held together by the gravity of thousands of years of culture and heritage.”

“The thing is, I never had a friend like Sohrab before. One who understood me without even trying. Who knew what it was like to be stuck on the outside because of one little thing that set you apart.”

″‘I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.’ ‘I wish you could see yourself too.’ I swallowed. ‘You’re the only person who never wanted me to change.‘”

“We sat around the table, drinking and laughing and smiling, but then we got kind of quiet. It was a nice kind of quiet. The kind you could wrap yourself up in like a blanket.”