a thousand words in the telling

"Farsi suits Persians. It is an outgrowth of the Persian sensibility. I have already spoken of the Persian character in regard to love and romance, but I haven't mentioned Farsi's most adorable feature: it is the language of liars. Not of cold-blooded liars - that's not what I mean. Not of liars who use language as a pickpocket uses his fingers. No, I mean those who dream, those who tell stories to themselves that they believe because of the beauty of the telling, those who use words to make roses bloom in the desert, where the sun has baked the soil black and red. [...]
Is is not the language of the downright, of the straight-talking, of the morally fearless. Can you ever get a straight answer from a Persian? No, it's not possible, because on the way to providing a straight answer, the Persian suddenly becomes aware of a hundred more fascinating routes to the answer, and before he knows it, before she knows it, a simple yes or no has become an adventure that requires a thousand words in the telling."



- Zarah Ghahramani, excerpted from "My Life as a Traitor"

Iran = "Aryan"

I think of myself as a Persian rather than an Iranian. This is not hairsplitting. Persia existed before Iran, a name for the country that dates only to 1935, when the Pahlavis chose Iran, meaning "Aryan," to impress Western powers with Persia's supposed "white" racial pedigree. To think of myself as Persian allowes me to embrace the whole of my country's history, going back to the flowering of a distinctly Persian sensibility under the early Persian emperors - Achaemenes, Cyrus, and Darius -- twenty-five hundred years ago. For the first fifteen hundred years of Persia's existence, Zoroastrian was the state religion, and so, by embracing Persia's past, I also embrace the roots of my religion..."

- Zarah Ghahramani, excerpted from "My Life as a Traitor"