Scheherazade Quotes

“Stories are masks of God.

That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.

Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.

Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.

So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.”
― Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling

“Scheherazade had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of bygone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.”
― Richard Francis Burton, One Thousand and One Nights: Complete Arabian Nights Collection

“She would take him to faraway lands to observe foreign ways, so he could get closer to the strangeness within himself.”
― Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

“The trees are bedecked with snow, the air is perfumed; how sweet, how dark the sultry fragrance. Forever hypnotising, always haunting. I want to inhale the fragrance of your skin, drink from your open mouth.”
― Suzy Davies, Johari's Window

“You were also Scheherazade to yourself.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“-On sharing the love story of the Persian prince Khushraw and the niece of the queen of Armenia Shirin (who were looking for each other but in opposite directions): "Both lovers then departed, looking for each other in opposite directions, a theme universal in its pathos, because we all spend our brief lives doing just that, even if we physically share our beds with the same person every night for years. Always we carry an image in our head of a better person, of an ideal person, which blurs our chances of finding happiness.”
― Fatima Marnissi

“Blaine: GOOD, GUNSLINGER. A VALIANT EFFORT. BUT YOU ARE NOT SCHEHERAZADE, NOR DO WE HAVE A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS IN WHICH TO HOLD PALAVER.
Roland: I don't understand you. I know not this Scheherazade.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“All those sperm had to go somewhere, just as girls had to have periods. In other words, he was a typical teenager. Neither hero nor saint. She found that knowledge something of a relief.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“I chose the Scheherazade, an irresistible-sounding combination of pistachio cake with cream cheese frosting and a raspberry center, topped with a generous sprinkling of crushed pistachios and one perfect raspberry. I've always loved raspberries but since arriving in Paris had a newfound passion for pistachios, which were included in so many delectable desserts and pastries, either whole or ground with sugar into delicious marzipan.”
― Amy Thomas, Paris, My Sweet: A Year in the City of Light

“Imagination is what gives rise to reality”
― Alexandra Monir, Realm of Wonders

“I felt like there was an infinity within our affinity, that our connection was so deep and fathomless that there was no way we could be bound by something as mundane as dawn. We were our own suns”
― Bolu Babalola, Love in Colour: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold

“They say Scheherazade saved all women with storytelling

I can’t even save myself before sunrise

I feel like I’m down
there with him
pushing against
what hurts most”
― Mona Kareem