Jasmin Darznik > Quotes

“I was a woman and I couldn't speak with the voice of a man, because it was not my voice - not true and not my own. But there was more to it than that. By writing in a woman's voice I wanted to say that a woman, too, is a human being. To say that we, too, have the right to breathe, to cry out, and to sing.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“We only lose ourselves by looking back.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Art could survive; even when suppressed, even when outlawed, it could survive far worse fates than fire.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Remember the flight, for the bird is mortal.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“A woman could see herself better when she wasn't known, I decided.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“You don’t own the stories that happen to you,”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“A woman could see herself better where she wasn’t known, I decided.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Love is another country. No, I’d go further than that. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between being in love and not being in love. Not only does the world around you seem changed when you are in love—bright where it was once dull, lively and varied where it was once routine—but people are different, not least of all you yourself, though the difference might be that you’ve returned to your native self.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Remember its flight, for the bird is mortal. —Forugh Farrokhzad, Iranian poet (1935–1967)”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Mine was a country where they said a woman’s nature is riddled with sin, where they claimed that women’s voices had the power to drive men to lust and distract them from matters of both heaven and earth.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Live every day as if you might be struck blind--that was the rule I made for myself now. In those first few days after the quarantine was lifted, we went around marveling at the smallest things, as if the Spanish flu had rendered us all blind & we'd suddenly gained our sight again. Every detail seemed suddenly as sharp as if seen for the first time. Life returned to SF, and it had never been more precious.”
― Jasmin Darznik, The Bohemians

“By insulting people’s intelligence you lose any chance to educate them, and in refusing the validity of their perspective you’ve denied yourself the main purpose of making art.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“The city had changed beyond recognition. Wrecking balls and bulldozers had leveled the old buildings to rubble. The dust of construction hung permanently over the streets. Gated mansions reached up to the northern foothills, while slums fanned out from the city’s southern limits.
I feared an aged that had lost its heart, and I was terrified at the thought of so many useless hands. Our traditions were our pacifiers and we put ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of a once-great civilation and culture. Ours was the land of poetry flowers, and nightingales—and poets searching for rhymes in history’s junkyards. The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafés. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plaster swans. We saw the future in neon lights. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had trafric jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers who came to the capital with scraps of paper in their hands, begging for someone to show them the way to this medical clinic or that government officee. the streets of Tehran were full of Mustangs and Chevys bought at three times the price they sold for back in America, and still our oil wasn’t our own. Still our country wasn’t our own.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Connection,” I said. “Not just between one idea and another, but between people.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“It was autumn, the season of pomegranate and quince. The scent of roasted nuts and barbecued corn from the street vendors, of mud-packed alleyways, gasoline fumes, and concrete roads—I hadn’t known, until I encountered them again, how much I’d missed the city.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“In Abadan I was different, but no one particularly cared. A woman could see herself better where she wasn’t known, I decided.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“You don't own the stories that happen to you.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“I’d long since discovered the pleasure of breaking a rule, but that day I coupled it with an even greater pleasure: telling a story.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Eventually, the men’s talk of politics turned to poetry. The recitations could begin with a quatrain from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat:

I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry,
Half a loaf for a bite to eat,
Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot,
Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm.

To which a voice might answer with a poem by Rumi:

My arrow of love
has arrived at the target
I am in the house of mercy
and my heart
is a place of prayer.

These gatherings went on for hours, with one guest after another reciting poems of the Persian masters—Rumi, Khayyam, Sa’adi, snd Hafez. That my father, the Colonel, who could make us cower with a single sidelong glance, produced the most skillful recitations both bewildered and fascinated me. His voice had a deep timbre perfectly suited to reciting verse, and the frequent cries of “Lovely!” and “Exquisite!” roused him to ever more passionate declamation.
I listened from behind the window, enraptured by the music of a language that can sometimes sound like susurrations of a lover and sometimes like the reed’s plaintive song. The words hooked into me and wouldn’t let me go. Rivers, oceans, and deserts, the nightingale and the rose—the perennial symbols of Persian poetry first grew familiar to me through these late-night scenes in the garden, and even though I was still a young girl, only just a child, the verses called me away to different lands.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“All at once the desert was everywhere, and I was overcome with a feeling of relief. Sand, rocks, hills—the whole landscape was tinted the same shade of orange as the sky.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Alma Lavenson”
― Jasmin Darznik, The Bohemians

“averting”
― Jasmin Darznik, Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

“But I don’t like this feeling of secrecy. I don’t like to pretend. I had to do that for so long, before.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“Modotti, Louise Dahl, Margrethe Mather, and Hansel Mieth.”
― Jasmin Darznik, The Bohemians

“There are moments in life when time seems to stand still. This was one. All you can do is hold your breath and hope it will wait for you.”
― Jasmin Darznik, The Bohemians

“The belief that you could create yourself -- it was the most American part of us both, Caroline and me. Were we running from the past or toward the future? And what would it mean to arrive?”
― Jasmin Darznik, The Bohemians

“A portrait is many things: a document, a moment in time, a refuge for memory. But above all, it is the meeting of two people, the seer and the seen.”
― Jasmin Darznik

“If he could not restore her to the status of a respectable woman, then Sohrab would make her into something else entirely, something hitherto unknown in their entire extended family, an educated woman, a professional woman.”
― Jasmin Darznik, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life

“Surely you’d agree it’s as necessary for an artist to show people the evidence of life’s beauty as it is to give them a document of its ugliness and despair?”
― Jasmin Darznik, The Bohemians

“Then one day everything changed. I was walking in my old mackintosh past the City of Paris after work, when I caught my reflection in the store window. There it was, plain as day: That coat made me invisible. I’d worn it for years on my walks through New York, walks on which I’d learned the pleasure of solitude and begun to shed my fear of being out alone in the city. A few weeks before, I’d nearly thrown it away outside the ferry building, but looking at myself now, I saw its power was undiminished; if anything, it was stronger”
― Jasmin Darznik, The Bohemians