top of page

Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri

Top 10 Best Quotes

“A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered...And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything...Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love....God should be both. If a god isn't, that is no God.”

“Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead.”

“What you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.”

“Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do. You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time.”

“Every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.”

“Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for.”

“Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last. Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.”

“Imagine you're evil. Not misunderstood. Not sad. But evil. Imagine you've got a heart that spends all day wanting more. Imagine your mind is a selfish room full of pride or pity. Imagine you're like Brandon Goff and you find poor kids in the halls and make fun of their clothes, and you flick their ears until they scream in pain and swing their arms, and so you pin them down and break their fingers. Or you spit in his food in the cafeteria. Or you just call him things like cockroach and sand monkey. Imagine you're evil and you don't do any of those things, but you're like Julie Jenkins and you laugh and you laugh at everything Brandon does, and you even help when a teacher comes and asks what's going on and you say nothing's going on, and he believes you because you get A-pluses in English. Or imagine you just watch all of this. And you act like you're disgusted, because you don't like meanness. But you don't do anything or tell anyone. Imagine how much you've got compared to all the kids in the world getting blown up or starved, and the good you could do if you spent half a second thinking about it. Suddenly evil isn't punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it's all that stuff you've left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.”

“Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you've never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it's a loving thing to do. You speak someone else's words to yourself, and hear them for the first time. What you're doing now is listening to me, in the parlor of your mind, but also speaking to yourself, thinking about the parts of me you like or the parts that aren't funny enough. You evaluate, like Mrs. Miller says. You think and wrestle with every word.”

“Memories are always partly untrue.”

Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves as promotional material only. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.

Book Keywords:

writing-quotes, evil, bravery, kindness, god, poetry, reading, bullying

bottom of page