Neda Aria > Quotes

“For me, all those systematic Bureaucracies of traditional schools jaded me. For me, I still couldn’t understand why we have to have a factory style education for children living in the 21st century. Why hold them in place, asking them to read and repeat and giving them a number of tasks to finish? I still have no idea how exams and objective assessments could measure human behavior or intelligence. Is it some kind of barcoding human aptitude? Is it ethical anyway?”
― Neda Aria, Ideo: The Bitter Recipes of the Truth

“For how long would I be trapped in the condition of melancholy without going insane?”
― Neda Aria

“Lilith Wilde is more than just a pseudonym; she’s the embodiment of my romance literary rebirth. Think of her as the writer who guzzles coffee like water, who gets hit by writer’s block like it’s a sport, who eavesdrops on strangers for dialogue inspiration, and who looks to cats for a muse (because why not?). With Lilith Wilde, I go back into romance, but this time, with a flavor that’s as dark as my coffee.”
― Neda Aria

“We didn’t call it a date, but it felt like one—the kind of electric connection that exists in the spaces between words, the moments when you forget the world and just exist with someone who makes you feel alive.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“We can reach a global harmony if we remove xenophobia”
― Neda Aria

“She told me, ‘Never ever put me in this situation again. Your problems are yours to solve.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“It’s not the absence of a child I miss. It’s the power to decide.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“Many women give up on how they look these days. They become a communality in a society that prefers to follow rather than stand out. They merge in time as if it doesn’t exist and they fade away into it. No one will hear about them ever again when they die. In their culture, uniqueness is a sin. To be part of this fake paradise, they become a commodity.”
― Neda Aria, Rhythm of Missing Pieces

“Those crows, those damn, bad-luck crows. It’s all their fault.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“I kneeled down, “I do whatever you please. I do whatever you want.” I tried to touch him. “Choke me, hit me, I would take it all.”
― Neda Aria, Bella Donna

“Mom would always say, ‘We’re in Iran, but this house is America. Here, we’re free. We watch what we want, listen to what we want, do what we want.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“I leaped over the American flag painted on the ground. I couldn’t bring myself to step on it. Never. I had one proudly hung on my bedroom wall.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“The weight of the lies I tell are choking me, but I can’t bear the thought of being anything less than a woman in his eyes.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“It’s funny how a city can feel so alive yet make you feel so small.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“The headmistress grabbed my file and slapped it into my chest. ‘Take your bad attitude somewhere else.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“I carried Iran in my veins and America in my dreams, but neither felt like home. I existed somewhere in between—a place where belonging meant letting go of both.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“I hated how easily she could flip her mood because some random guy took an interest. She was only eleven.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“You’re not a kid, my daughter… Prophet Mohammad’s wife was nine years old when he married her!”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“I never fully understood what it meant to identify as a woman while living in Iran. I never understood it outside of Iran, either.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“Two men as old as my dad on a noisy bike passed by and yelled, ‘I wanna eat your cunt!”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“You’re not resisting enough, darling. If you wanted to go, you would. Unsurprisingly, you’re giving up. You’re still as weak as you were and you will always be if you continue looking at yourself this way. The cycle will never end. I can’t help you forever. You have to make a change now. Separate yourself from yourself. Time won’t wait for anyone, even you.”
― Neda Aria, Rhythm of Missing Pieces

“Back in middle school, I was expelled for wearing clear nail polish.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“He wasn’t just Gus; he was possibility, the ‘what if’ that echoed through every choice I made to leave behind the chaos for the comfort of the known. And yet, I never stopped wondering—what if I had chosen differently?”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“Sometimes, I can’t separate the reality from dream or illusion. Sometimes, I get so tired thinking about what if I’m not really here and all the good things happened in my life were just a mirage.”
“I guess you feel it when you reach some sort of pleasure?”
“True. I’m suffering from the fear of losing happiness. The fear that the moments of joy to be taken away from me and be replaced by a tragedy”
“Cherophobia. That’s what it’s called.”
She glanced at my face “Yeah. That’s what the shrink said”
“I’ll cure your fear”
“How?”
“By eternal life”
― Neda Aria

“Freedom isn’t the absence of rules; it’s the ability to decide which ones you’ll break for the life you want to live.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“For me, the past is a sack of garbage that needs to be left outdoors to be picked up.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“...What’s the purpose of an eternal life when you lose everyone and everything you love? What’s truly the purpose of that?”
“Is love the only essence of life?”
“Of course it is. What is life without it? Life without love is just a colorless outline of an unfinished masterpiece”
― Neda Aria

“Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to paint all this time. Not Gus, not motherhood, not even myself. But that quiet, unspoken loss.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“What is womanhood, really? It’s about the relentless grind of it—the moment your body betrays you, when you realize your identity will always feel like something to defend.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows

“How do you paint the pieces of a life you can’t quite remember, but feel in every aching part of your soul? Gus wasn’t just a memory—I was trying to create him, to pull him from the void of my past and place him on a canvas I could finally understand.”
― Neda Aria, Counting Crows