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691680b
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The class went all right, and the ones after became easier. I was enthusiastic, naive and idealistic, and I was in love with my books.
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97d247c
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After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.
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e357922
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I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like A..
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reading
teaching
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0eb3103
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I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.
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9981143
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these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.
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war
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1bf1e0a
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She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
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vulnerability
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30e2413
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L'empatia e il cuore di Gasby, come di molti altri romanzi. Non c'e niente di piu riprovevole che restare ciechi di fronte ai problemi e ai dolori altrui.
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ed5a6c3
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It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were respected and understood.
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inexperience
respect
teaching
standards
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a8142d3
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And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby
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e18eae7
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These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...what James's characters gain is self-respect.
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self-respect
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fee9f80
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And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.
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reading
voice
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c4c7965
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He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else.
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sense-of-place
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1402ef3
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This is the old part of Tehran, with small spice shops, dusty narrow alleys with dry streams winding into houses with tall protective walls.
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Azar Nafisi |
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9cb3e59
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La mia fantasia ricorrente e che alla Carta dei Diritti dell'Uomo venga aggiunta la voce: diritto all'immaginazione. Ormai mi sono convinta che la vera democrazia non puo esistere senza la liberta di immaginazione e il diritto di usufruire liberamente delle opere di fantasia. Per vivere una vita vera, completa, bisogna avere la possibilita di dar forma ed espressione ai propri mondi privati, ai propri sogni, pensieri e desideri; bisogna che..
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4515d3a
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Razieh had an amazing capacity for beauty. She said, You know, all my life I have lived in poverty. I had to steal books and sneak into movie houses-but, God, I loved those books! I don't think any rich kid has ever cherished Rebecca or Gone with the Wind the way I did when I borrowed the translations from houses where my mother worked.
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e7c8f90
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In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This
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0957924
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Our world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below.
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0847cc0
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He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment,
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99a9bc0
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Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams."
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764280b
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.' So declared Yassi in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly ironic, which on rare occasions, and this was one of them, bordered on the burlesque.
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2440d8b
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After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public--seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends--shifted to private homes. It was refreshing to go out once in a while, even to such a desultory event.
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aa29cc9
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Un grande romanzo acuisce le vostre percezioni, vi fa sentire la complessita della vita e degli individui, e vi difende dall'ipocrita certezza della validita delle vostre opinioni, nella morale a compartimenti stagni.
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ed2073c
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These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things."
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Azar Nafisi |
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800cd1e
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T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.
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Azar Nafisi |
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07bd169
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Uno di quei crepuscoli di mezza stagione, quando per un attimo l'aria pare condensare in se estate e autunno.
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Azar Nafisi |
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0e388ce
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L'insensibilita e tipica anche dei personaggi negativi di Jane Austen: Lady Catherine, Mrs Norris, Mr Collins o i Crawford. Il tema ricorre inoltre nell'opera di Henry James e negli eroi-mostro di Nabokov, Humbert, Kinbote, Van e Ada Veen. In questi romanzi l'immaginazione e equiparata all'empatia, alla capacita di immedesimazione: non possiamo vivere cio che hanno vissuto gli altri, pero in letteratura siamo in grado di comprendere anche i..
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reading
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2a9c82d
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You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual?
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f108310
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Whoever we were--and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not--we had become the figment of someone else's dreams.
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regime
totalitarianism
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dfbd2ee
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Looking back on that time it seems to me that such rapture over Tarkovsky by an audience most of whom would not have known how to spell his name, and who would under normal circumstances have ignored or even disliked his work, arose from our intense sensory deprivation. We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of..
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64167b1
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There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins--I'm sorry, I feel your pain?
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0ae05cf
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none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with every new person, as if I am starting anew. These things are instinctive. What you need to learn is to lay aside your inhibitions, to go back to your childhood when you played marbles or whatever with boys and never thought anything of it.
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romance
friendship
love
dating
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de91247
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This was Nassrin, or to be honest, this was the two of us together: sharing the most intimate moments with a shrug, pretending they were not intimate. It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; noth..
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0b12f94
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In the Damascus airport she had been humiliated by what she was assumed to be, and when she returned home, she felt angry because of what she could have been.
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b52cf38
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Both Yassi and I know that we have been losing our faith. We have been questioning it with every move. During the Shah's time, it was different. I felt I was in the minority and I had to guard my faith against all odds. Now that my religion is in power, I feel more helpless than ever before, and more alienated.' She wrote about how ever since she could remember, she had been told that life in the land of infidels was pure hell. She had been..
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hypocrisy
power
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6284e97
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Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them." --
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polarization
resentment
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3bf166d
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She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency.
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2c39f68
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she explained why all the normal acts of life had become small acts of rebellion and political insubordination to her and to other young people like her. All her life she was shielded. She was never let out of sight; she never had a private corner in which to think, to feel, to dream, to write. She was not allowed to meet any young men on her own. Her family not only instructed her on how to behave around men--they seemed to think they coul..
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d592102
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Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer. The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red..
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6482d1d
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We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent--namely ideology. This was a country where all gestures, even the most private, were interpreted in political terms. The colors of my head scarf or my father's tie were symbols of Western decadence and imperialist tendencies. Not wearing a beard, shaking hands with members of the opposi..
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dbf5690
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Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force.
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091ad21
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Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy--even in the books, there were few men for her. What was wrong with that?
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247a7e2
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Sempre mantive o habito prazeroso dos tempos de faculdade, de sublinhar passagens e fazer anotacoes. Grande parte de minhas notas de Orgulho e Preconceito, A herdeira, O morro dos ventos uivantes, Madame Bovary e Tom Jones foi feita durante as noites de insonia. 224
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9cfd168
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The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.
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totalitarianism
women-writers
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d50c619
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Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson's and Chapters.
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reading
publishing
bookstores
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Azar Nafisi |