Marjane Satrapi Quotes

I'm someone who lived in a war for five years. I received bombs on my head every day of my childhood. Did that stop me from living? Did that stop me from laughing?

When you're threatened, or something hard hits you, acknowledge it, embrace it. Don't pretend that you didn't get hurt - hurt, cry, think about it. And then you let it go and try something else.

I suppose I didn't cry in all the cancer crap stuff because I felt I couldn't lose the battle, and part of the battle was holding myself together.

I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable.

In a cruel land, you either learned to laugh at cruelty or spent your life weeping.

Resilience is not what happens to you. It’s how you react to, respond to, and recover from what happens to you.

In life you have two choices. You can laugh or you can cry. You have to laugh, you have to.

There are two responses to really awful things. One is to lament and say, "Oh my God, oh lord." And the other is to laugh at it a little bit, try your best to deal with it and, if you can, forget about it as soon as possible.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

People expect me to cry, but I always laugh when things go wrong.

I'm not used to crying. It's a little difficult. All my life I've had to fight. It's just another fight I'm going to have to learn how to win, that's all. I'm just going to have to keep smiling.

You're going to have highs and lows, but it's how you get through the lows.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.

The great challenge is to refuse to let the bad things that happen to us do bad things to us. That is the crucial difference between adversity and tragedy.

Pain is a byproduct of life. That’s the truth. Life sometimes sucks. That’s true for everyone. But if you don’t face the pain and the suck, you don’t ever get the other things either. Laughter. Joy. Love. Pain passes, but those things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for.

We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.

If you laugh at it, you can deal with it.

The hardest thing you can do is smile when you are ill, in pain, or depressed. But this no-cost remedy is a necessary first half-step if you are to start on the road to recovery.

I'm human, so of course certain things sometimes hurt. I just laugh at it.

What we cannot bear removes us from life; what remains can be borne.