"In those days, about ninety-five percent of Persian adults and nearly all women, were still illiterate. But my father, who always did exactly what he wanted to do, and did it with total and magnificent indifference to everyone else's opinion, had long entertained the highly unorthodox notion that education made women better wives" (pg. 12.)

"My father was extremely self-centered, and it never occurred to him to sconsider how I or my mother might feel about my having such a strange name. Shazdeh's perfect egotism was a great cause of aggravation to our mothers" (pg. 13.)

"Like nearly every other Iranian women of childbearing age, when she was not nursing one child she was usually pregnant with another, and by the time I was sixteen and she was about thirty-nine, she had not only me and Jaby, but my brothers Farough, Ghaffar and Rashid and my sisters Homy, Sory, and...