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 would like to see anyone, prophet, king or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.
Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?
No political event can be judged outside of the era and the circumstances in which it took place.
...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.
Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary, imperial joy and sorrow of human existence, the dreamed as well as the livedβ what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.
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