Best 12 quotes of Sadegh Hedayat on MyQuotes

[Death is] the best asylum for pains and sorrows and troubles and the injustices of life.

I have finally learned that I must remain silent as much as possible. I must always keep my thoughts to myself.

In life there are certain sores which, like a kind of canker, slowly erode the soul in solitude.

I thought to myself: if it’s true that every person has a star in the sky, mine must be distant, dim, and absurd. Perhaps I never had a star.

I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.

The presence of death annihilates all superstitions. We are the children of death, and it is death that rescues us from the deceptions of life. In the midst of life he calls us and summons us to him.

The sign of our time is that the dignity of the human personality has no place: the age is, as are its laws, impersonal, its heart as of stone... . Yet on arrest, in the name of these laws, we die like dogs, neither executioner nor victim making a sound. Because he has to gasp for air all his life, panting for breath is the man of today's only way out.

Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!

I am afraid that I may die tomorrow without knowing myself. My life experiences have taught me that a frightful chasm separates me from the others. The same experiences also have taught me when to remain silent and keep my thoughts to myself. Nevertheless, I have decided that I should write. That I should introduce myself to my shadow―the stooped shadow on the wall that voraciously swallows all that I put down. It is for him that I am making this experiment to see if we can know each other better. Since the time when I severed my ties with others, I want to know myself better. Absurd thoughts! Fine. Yet these thoughts torture me more than any reality. Are not these people who resemble me, who seemingly share my needs, whims and desires gathered here to deceive me? Are they not shadows brought into existence to mock and beguile me? Are not all my feelings, observations, and calculations imaginary and quite different from reality? I write only for the benefit of my shadow on the wall. I need to introduce myself to it. I thought in this base world, full of poverty and misery, for the first time in my life, a ray of sunshine shone on my life. But alas, instead of a sunbeam it was a transient beam, a shooting star that appeared to me in the likeness of a woman or an angel. In the light of that moment that lasted about a second, I witnessed all my life's misfortunes, and discovered their magnitude and grandeur. Then that beam of light disappeared into the dark abyss for which it was destined. No. I could not keep that transient beam for myself.

I was growing inward incessantly; like an animal that hibernates during the wintertime, I could hear other peoples' voices with my ears; my own voice, however, I could hear only in my throat. The loneliness and the solitude that lurked behind me were like a condensed, thick, eternal night, like one of those nights with a dense, persistent, sticky darkness which waits to pounce on unpopulated cities filled with lustful and vengeful dreams. My whole being could now be summed up in my voice―an insane, absolute record. The force that, out of loneliness, brings two individuals together to procreate has its roots in this same insanity which exists in everyone and which is mingled with a sense of regret, tending gradually toward death...Only death does not tell lies! The presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary. We are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life; it is death that beckons us from the depths of life.

There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.

The sun, like a golden knife, was steadily paring away the edge of the shade beside the walls.The streets were enclosed between old, whitewashed walls. Everywhere were peace and stillness, as though all the elements were obeying the sacred law of calm and silence imposed by the blazing heat. It seemed as though mystery was everywhere and my lungs hardly dared to inhale the air.