Dina Nayeri > Quotes

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“And here is the biggest lie in the refugee crisis. It isn’t the faulty individual stories. It is the language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees—deluge or flood or swarm. These words are lies.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“I am standing on a thin border between past and future. Waiting for madness to come.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“They don't like the damaged, I wanted to say, especially if they think the disease is in your mind. Trust me, the Americans and the English, they like triumphant stories. They want to be a part of the stories. They want to find excellent people, luminaires, pluck them out of hell, knead them flawless. They want to congratulate themselves for something remarkable. Keep yourself undamaged.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“In war, villainy and good change hands all the time, like a football.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Every true story has strangeness, things that can only happen to those people at that time—the unbiased listen for it, trying to imagine an unknown world. But the biased look only for familiar oddities, the ones that match and validate their own story.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, Refuge

“It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks.”
― Dina Nayeri

“If I were to write a model refugee narrative, it wouldn’t be the Good Immigrant, but the exile who, having endured many changes, now fears no risk. It is the immigrant who kept her agency, who has no shame, who believes in herself. The Good Immigrant would become The Capable Immigrant. Capable differs from good, because the choice to act isn’t taken for granted. And from whose point of view is “good” defined, anyway?”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Modern Iran is a country of refugees making do with small joys, exiled from the prerevolutionary paradise we knew. With the Iraq war over, their plight is often considered insufficient.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Europeans are always debating how much refugees will contribute; they claim to want the economically beneficial kind, the “good” immigrants. And yet, they welcome only those with a foot in the grave. Show any agency or savvy or industry before you left your home, and you’re done. People begin imagining you scheming to get out just to get rich off an idea (or a surgery or an atelier). They consider the surgery or atelier that doesn’t yet exist as property stolen from them. The minute you arrive, though, even if you did have a foot in the grave, god help you if you need social services for a while.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“one. Home is never the same, for anyone, not just refugees. You go back and find that you’ve grown, and so has your country. Home is gone; it lives in the mind. Time exiles us all from our childhood. Once, on a dark day, a friend quoted the late Jim Harrison to me, an echo of a warning from Rilke: Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“More infuriating is the word “opportunism,” a lie created by the privileged to shame suffering strangers who crave a small taste of a decent life. The same hopes in their own children would be labeled “motivation” and “drive.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“You can't fight instinct. You can't teach genuine restraint. I got my instincts from a man whose supply of restraint was as limited and unpredictable as the supply of black market music tapes or the last stash of sour cherries in the freezer.”
― Dina Nayeri, Refuge

“When women are powerless, the first thing the world exploits from them is what men perceive as the assets of their gender: sex, motherhood, homemaking.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri

“Believing can end suffering; it's a kind of love.”
― Dina Nayeri, Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough

“And while we grumble over what we are owed and how much we get to keep, the displaced wait at the door. They are painters and surgeons and craftsmen and students. Children. Mothers. The neighbor who made a good sauce. The funny girl from science class. The boy who can really dance. The great-uncle who always turns down the wrong street. They endure painful transformation, rising from death, discarding their faces and bodies, their identities, without guarantee of new ones.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“In asylum interviews, no one believes an instant conversion. And yet, the moment the refugee is welcomed in, he is expected to make just such a quick transformation, to shed his past, to walk through the gates clean, unencumbered by a past self. Can a person’s heart and mind change in an instant? Can the habits of his hands, the words on his tongue?”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Maybe truth is only a direction to aim for. “In talking about the past,” says William Maxwell, “We lie with every breath we draw.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“It was just a cruel instinct, an itch that required a long witchy nail.”
― Dina Nayeri, Refuge

“It is a question of racial dominance. If whiteness is to be linked to education, culture, the creation of great cities, the brightest people of color cannot have their attention on home. They must belong to white culture.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“I know now that expertise is gained quietly, alone in dark hours, digging into the dirt as the skills to present that knowledge erode. When so many professionals are satisfied projecting bulk onto a funhouse mirror, craving only the prescription pad, the office, the veneer of expertise, who’s going to believe the quiet hermit who appears like a frightened kitten on television? We’ve relaxed into our shortcuts and we’re primed to be fooled.”
― Dina Nayeri, Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough

“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. I was a palatable immigrant because I programmed myself with chants: I am rescued cargo. I will prove, repay, transform. 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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“There is no logical or just reason for a mediocre few, shielded from competition, propped up by inherited riches and passports, to feast on the world’s resources under the guise of meritocracy.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“my mother told me that when she had been a Muslim she was simply searching, and Islam fit only some of what she held sacred. In Christianity, she found her beliefs in their purest form. I now know that I was searching for feminism, and along the way, I shed every doctrine and institution that failed to live up to it. Islam went first. Later, all religion would follow.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Achebe recoiled at the notion that achievement should be any kind of gauge of our human obligations to one another. In conversations about the refugee crisis, educated people continue to make the barbaric argument that open doors will benefit the host nation. The time for this outdated colonialist argument has run out; migrants don’t derive their value from their benefit to the Western-born, and civilized people don’t ask for résumés from the edge of the grave.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Now that I have a daughter, It's time I made sense of my own story and identity so she can be certain of hers.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee