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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 02e6360 | 'yh lqry Htj mnk l~ n ttkhyln f`lan l'nn ln nZhr dh lm tf`l | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 89f2451 | These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the win.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 5534977 | It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice...forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me....This is nothing, nothing really. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 01c596b | fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| a48b487 | I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| ca4beae | Is it possible to write a reverent novel," said Nassrin, "and to have it be good?..." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 1ab0b07 | Such an act [testifying for an accused prison guard of the Shah's regime] can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality.... Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sid.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 23bc989 | In his forward to the English edition of Invitation to a Beheading (1959), Nabokov reminds the reader that his novel does not offer 'tout pour tous.' Nothing of the kind. 'It is,' he claims, 'a violin in the void.' [...] There was something, both in his fiction and in his life, that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away. I think that is what drove me to create the cl.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 153c085 | In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so provident or benign. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| c98df98 | How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| fe57fc2 | incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| a8a9b87 | Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as.. | literature | Azar Nafisi | |
| bf5baf7 | When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their democratic enterprise. Knowledge was not just a luxury; it was essential. | reading education | Azar Nafisi | |
| 3f875b0 | The most important result of the encounter [in the preceding anecdote] is the scholar's startling discovery of the roundness of the earth . . . Instinctively realizing the connection between the foreigner's presence, the roundness of the earth, and future changes and upheavals, he finally announces, "Yes, the earth is round, the women will start to think, and as soon as they begin to think, they will become shameless." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 5d026ba | My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| ddfae1b | She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| e83628e | There is seldom a physical description of a character or scene in and yet we feel that we have seen each of these characters and their intimate worlds; we feel we know them, and sense their surroundings. We can see Elizabeth's reaction to Darcy's denunciation of her beauty, Mrs. Bennet chattering at the dinner table or Elizabeth and Darcy walking in and out of the shadows of the Pemberley estate. The amazing thing is that all of this is c.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 80678ea | I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends. | indignation | Azar Nafisi | |
| db3d27a | But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling "the Republic of Imagination." I think of it as Nabokov's "somehow, somewhere" or Alice's backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or do.. | reading inspiration | Azar Nafisi | |
| c31dada | This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 78da3f5 | We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| b6060e0 | At that time, she had worn the scarf as a testament to her faith. Her decision was a voluntary act. When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| ce00136 | There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mytholog.. | silence tyranny | Azar Nafisi | |
| a2a462c | nh mn lmkhyf Hqan 'n yHs lnsn blHry@, w'n ykwn msw'wlan `n qrrth! | Azar Nafisi | ||
| b0d76e3 | One can believe James's claim to an "imagination of disaster"; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such 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." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 540ea98 | Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience. | the-press discourse | Neil Postman | |
| f29eefa | We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet. | Neil Postman | ||
| ae80ef2 | We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase. The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, .. | telegraphy public-discourse typography | Neil Postman | |
| d5bc649 | The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, .. | telegraphy intelligence public-discourse typography knowledge | Neil Postman | |
| d29f32c | In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, there appears a remarkable quotation attributed to Michael Welfare, one of the founders of a religious sect known as the Dunkers and a longtime acquaintance of Franklin. the statement had its origins in Welfare's complaint to Franklin that zealots of other religious persuasions were spreading lies about the Dunkers, accusing them of abominable principles to which, in fact, they were utter strangers.. | From Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman | ||
| e0278de | The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is .. | Neil Postman | ||
| 1dd0c9d | How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest. | Neil Postman | ||
| 1128186 | As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. | Neil Postman | ||
| 6b4a5b6 | How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it.. | news media | Neil Postman | |
| 773aded | The world of the known and the not yet known is bridged by wonderment. But wonderment happens largely in a situation where the child's world is separate from the adult world, where children must seek entry, through their questions, into the adult world. As media merge the two worlds, as the tension created by secrets to be unraveled is diminished, the calculus of wonderment changes. Curiosity is replaced by cynicism or, even worse, arroganc.. | Neil Postman | ||
| c7bd3a6 | La actual preocupacion casi histerica por la seguridad es en el mejor de los casos un derroche de recursos y un obstaculo para el espiritu humano, y en el peor de los casos una invitacion al totalitarismo. Se necesita con urgencia educacion publica. | insecurity | Michael Crichton | |
| 7f835b3 | On the video monitor, they saw Ted Fielding slap the polished sphere and shout, "Open! Open Sesame! Open up, you son of a bitch!" The sphere did not respond." | Michael Crichton | ||
| 4876590 | What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told--and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. | Michael Crichton | ||
| ff05364 | I often hear skeptics say that, if psychic behavior was real, the psychics would be playing the stock markets or the ponies. In my experience, many of them do. There is, in fact, a kind of secret level of activity in which psychics consult to major corporations and businesses. People seem embarrassed to admit this activity but it takes place, just as you'd expect it to. | psychic stock-market | Michael Crichton | |
| ac3d41f | A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existing theory cannot be overstated. Arthur Eddington once said you should never believe any experiment until it has been confirmed by theory, but this humorous view has a reality that cannot be disc.. | theory science skepticism | Michael Crichton | |
| 8ba3ffe | I don't read Stephen King, I read Michael Crichton." I prefer to be confused shitless rather than scared shitless." | Nick Pirog | ||
| 9e7d8d4 | Whether you see the world as emergent or, deteriorating. We have long known that some people favor innovation and look positively toward the future while others are frightened of change and want to halt innovation. | Michael Crichton | ||
| e1a7304 | As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect these alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have a threatening or exotic aspect. | the-future consciousness | Michael Crichton | |
| fa87252 | All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years o.. | higher-law science life innovation | Michael Crichton |