Sadegh Hedayat quotes:

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

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

Only death does not lie.

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!

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

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.

If there was no death, everyone would wish for it.

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

My one fear is that tomorrow I may die without having come to know myself.

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.

What relationship could exist between the lives of the fools and healthy rabble who were well, who slept well, who performed the sexual act well, who had never felt the wings of death on their face every moment-what relationship could exist between them and one like me who has arrived at the end of his rope and who knows that he will pass away gradually and tragically?