Dina Nayeri Quotes

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.

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

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.

We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.

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.

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.

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