My pink shoes... were what I would now call "slip-ons" ---flat soles, no laces or buckles, a bit like ballet shoes. The front of each one was ornamented with an artificial flower, a darker pink than the body of the shoe. When I was six, those shoes expressed more about the world in which I wanted to live than anything I could possibly have put into words. In a strange way, those pink shoes and my appetite for the places I might go in them led me, after many twists and turns, to a cell in Evin Prison. - p. 13 The depth of our grieving has to do with the importance of love in our culture. This may sound very strange to Westerners who have been encouraged to adopt a cartoon-version of Iranians---suicide bombers, warmongers, religious zealots. But love is the more important thing to grasp when you study Iranians. - p. 29 Iranians fall in love in exactly the same was as everyone else in the world. Muslims fall in love in the same way as everyone else in the wor