Everything Sad Is Untrue: List 4

Some rugs from Isfahan even have silk and gold thread in the paisley designs.

The artisans of Kashan and Isfahan and Tabriz and Mashad all knew that only God was perfect—the only one who could listen to and speak the perfect truth. To remind themselves, and to show their humility, they would purposefully include one missed knot in every rug, one imperfection.

My sister and I never talked much, because I only picked riveting shows about duck detectives and mouse detectives so we were riveted.

The Australians, the Americans at the embassy where she would sit all day to beg them to let us into their country, nobody.

And you think, “I’m going to die. They’re going to split apart and I will free-fall into brambles where the demons hide, into their waiting claws. The whole world will tear me open.”

Already, he had a favorite waiter who knew if he paid my dad extra attention, if the drinks were always on the way, discreet and cold, the ashtray always clean, then the tip would be prosperous.

My sister and the girl wanted to be left alone, but also wanted me and the boy to want to play with them, so they spurred us to do tricks that they would judge.

My dad would be enthralled by me more than any country...

If I could entertain and entrance, I would be like a drug, compelling him to follow us.

My dad grabbed my left arm (because I was flailing).

The line made a scraping sound somewhere deep in my skull and I felt the skin dragging across the bone to cinch together. When it met, he tugged the line two times to make a tight seal.

“If you have compliance from the father, you can apply for a certificate of important information.”

“If you don’t have a certificate of important information, you’ll need to fill out an appeal for special circumstance form.”

She would spend the next few weeks tracking down the new form, filling it out with all the required documentation, and having it officiated and notarized.

But on the hill, you could see beautiful things, like the peach orchards of the nearby farms, and the terra-cotta roofs of the town center in the distance.

They just walked over the mountains and showed up to sleep in the town squares of Italian villages, washing their clothes in the fountains and begging up and down the porticoes.

Hotel Barba was limbo. It was the middle waiting area between whatever hellish situation people had come from and whatever free paradise they imagined on the other side.

A champion of champions who would not eat frankfurters or fries from the hand of a begrudging host.

But I replied that she is beholden to a Western mode of storytelling that I do not accept and that the 1,001 Nights are basically Scheherazade stalling for time, so I don’t see the difference.

What do you know that keeps going?
Never distracted? Never bored? Never deterred?

In Oklahoma they put two-ton winches on the fronts of their trucks to rip out tree stumps and even then, some of them won’t move.

It lumbered out of the entry and seemed to slow down the river just by sitting on it.

From the highway, you could only see people far away like ants and hear the tinny music playing on the loudspeaker.

Reader who is kind to sheep and wears tasteful hats.

She nibbled the pastry as tentatively as a deer.

A few months after we finished the workbooks in Italy, the President of the United States said we could have asylum—but only if an American family vouched for us and promised we wouldn’t become the kind of people who live on welfare and steal from Americans.

I mean he got on the pulpit and said, “Brothers and sisters, we are lucky enough to welcome Muzoo Niari tonight, all the way from Iran. And Muzoo, if you’ll permit me, I’d like to speak just to you tonight. Because if a shepherd has a hundred sheep, but even one is lost, he doesn’t abandon it, but goes looking for it, to save the one.”

She was replenished by the same thing that amused my dad.

They were both necessary, cause the next step was for my dad to renounce Satan, and then they’d dip him backward (like action movie heroes do to ladies when they tango with them), and it would take both men to lift my dad back up out of the water.

He juts his jaw down at her and says, “Say it to me again.”