I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle of identity faced by individuals living between two cultures.
Marjane Satrapi's quote encapsulates the deep sense of disconnection experienced by those who navigate multiple cultural identities. Living as both a westerner in Iran and an Iranian in the West, she illustrates the profound confusion and loss that can result from not fully belonging to either culture, leading to existential questions about the purpose of life and identity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about multiculturalism and identity struggles during a cultural conference.
It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.
If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it's a failure. That is what I think.
I'm not a politician. I don't know how to solve the problems of the world. But as an artist, I have one duty: to ask questions.
I'm not a politician because I'm an artist. Politicians have a very easy answer for a very complicated question. I have a very complicated question for what you consider very easy situations.
For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.
My mother always told me I had to do 100 times better than a man. I had to work hard at maths, and learn four languages.
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.
When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt β we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.
Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
God uses lust to impel men to marry, ambition to office, avarice to earning, and fear to faith. God led me like an old blind goat.
There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.
Pain forces even the innocent to lie.
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