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"I made so many promises when I arrived here.Now I'm not so sure. Now I'm worried. Now my mind is a traitor because my thoughts crawl out of bed every morning with darting eyes and sweating palms and nervous giggles that sit in my chest, build in my chest, threaten to burst through my chest, and the pressure is tightening and tightening and tighteningLife around here isn't what I expected it to be."
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"Worrying about things that haven't happened yet is like riding on the hood of your car-what's the point?"

"As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire."

"Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness."

"I've never felt so bereft and panicky. What do I do without my phone? How do I function? My hand keeps automatically reaching for my phone in its usual place in my pocket. Every instinct in me wants to text someone, 'OMG, I've lost my phone! ' but how can do that without a bloody phone?"

"In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past."

"My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition."
Explore more quotes by Tahereh Mafi


"Studies have shown that thinking and wondering lead to thoughtful decision-making. It's an epidemic."


"I want to be the friend you fall hopelessly in love with. The one you take into your arms and into your bed and into the private world you keep trapped in your head. I want to be that kind of friend. The one who will memorize the things you say as well as the shape of your lips when you say them. I want to know every curve, every freckle, every shiver of your body. I want to know where to touch you, I want to know how to touch you. I want to know convince you to design a smile just for me. Yes, I do want to be your friend. I want to be your best friend in the entire world."


"Red was ruby, green was fluorescent, yellow was simply incandescent. Color was life. Color was everything.Color, you see, was the universal sign of magic."


"Loneliness is a strange sort of thing.It creeps up on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones,squeezing so tight you almost can't breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out from every corner.It's a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you're struggling to stand up.You wake up in the morning and wonder who you are. You fail to fall asleep at night and tremble in your skin."


"Because it's so difficult to fight what you cannot control and right now I can't even control my own imagination as it grips my hair and drags me into the dark."


"We're too different now. We want different things. And this?" I say nodding at our hands. "All this managed to prove is that you are extremely good at turning me off."


"Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell."


"We've been shattered and reconstructed, told to make an effort every single day to pretend we still function the way we're supposed to. But it's a lie, it's all a lie; every person, place, thing and idea is a lie. I do not function properly. I am nothing more than the consequence of catastrophe."
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