Quotes from Alison Wearing

until we make peace with our homes, we can never quite make peace with ourselves.

When our revolution became very severe with killing in street and hostage in Emrika embassy, it made afraid all Emrika. Even it made afraid many Iranian...Emrika did think: Iran became cray! But really Iranian was same people, only difference, we have some fanatic with power. Everyone else same.

In Canada, Coca-Cola, Turtle Man explains as he fills my glass. In Iran, Pipi Zam Zam.

She opens her schoolbook to a lesson called A Day In London, curls up beside me and rests her head on my shoulder...I read, We are in London. It rains. It is very cold. Everyone is sad because the weather is dreadful. Churches are empty, but shops are full. Most people drive cars, but they are very expensive. Many people are without food. The Queen wears much jewellery.

When Karen speaks in Farsi, which she does even with her children, the tone of her Southern drawl colours the language in a strange an inimitable way. I listen for several minutes and decide that Farsi is, by nature, a language of deep greens and browns, and that Karen speaks it in bright red swaths.

His eyes are the colour of the lowest notes on a cello. His eyelashes are so long, I feel them brush against my face as he blinks.

I want to be someone so filled with curiosity and determination that I trundle around foreign cities looking for obscure pieces of a puzzle that might help me understand who I am, and still be game for Zumba when I'm eighty.

The music becomes boisterous and acoustic, at the low end of genius but brilliant in spirit and tone. It is joy by fiddle, laughter by accordion, Ireland through to the bone.

Authors Note: This is a sketchbook, a collection of my impressions of Iran and its people. For the most part, I have painted situations as they occurred, present voices as precisely as possible. At times, I have made collages of stories and faces, as often to protect the identities of people as to lend artistry to a scene. As is the case with many portraits, their truth is not in their detail, but their spirit.

Canada, he told me one day through squinted eyes and smoke rings, is full of violent cowards. People believe they are gentile, but they attack in quiet ways. They use their intellect, their knowledge, always trying to prove they are smarter, more important. The man with no ego is the gentle man, Canada is a land of civilized barbarians.