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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 34a4206 | he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been! | Joseph Heller | ||
| 957fba8 | Just for once I'd like to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person in the universe getting exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this universe. | Joseph Heller | ||
| ea8a3e6 | Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out. | Joseph Heller | ||
| 36f71b3 | Dreams,Mr.Nazari,are perfect ideals,complete in themselves. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 926f1a0 | Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| bf89f74 | readers were born free and ought to remain free." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0355230 | In other words, don't be reductive. Often, writers will rush to an ending that completes, or sums up, or reduces their story as opposed to moving to a place where it goes to something they may not understand and that may be incomplete but is more honest. That rush doesn't do a service to anyone. It doesn't do a service to the work, and it doesn't do a service to the reader. We know that things are complex; we want things to be complex so th.. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 0590a5f | The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves as a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of society. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 39cd249 | I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close. | life pain | Aimee Bender | |
| 7f35627 | Un roman, n'est pas une allegorie, ai-je conclu. C'est l'experience, a travers nos propres sens, d'un autre monde. Si vous n'entrez pas dans ce monde, si vous ne retenez pas votre souffle en meme temps que les personnages qui le peuplent, si vous ne vous impliquez pas dans ce qui va leur arriver, vous ne connaitrez pas l'empathie, et l'empathie est au coeur du roman. Voila comment il faut lire la fiction, en inhalant l'experience qu'elle vo.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 05a843a | Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president or representative, your children's future, your way and view of life. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 7409f46 | Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 6e12a5b | The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity. | self-discovery | Azar Nafisi | |
| 33923f0 | The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality. My students witnessed it in show trials on television and enacted it every time they went out into the streets dressed as they were told to dress. They had not become part of the crowd who watched.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 5eacaae | It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 02a1d4c | Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can't experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic--not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart .. | novels | Azar Nafisi | |
| d6c946a | A novel is not an allegory...it is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel; you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 3f5953d | 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 wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution...For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of aw.. | beauty censorship collective | Azar Nafisi | |
| f2baafe | Don't let strangers touch you." And yet it is seldom strangers, I learned long before I was a teenager, who do you harm. It is always the ones closest to us: the suave chauffeur, the skilled photographer, the kind music teacher, the good friend's sober and dignified husband, the pious man of God. They are the ones your parents trust, whom they don't want to believe anything against." | strangers trust | Azar Nafisi | |
| d0e0d84 | The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination. | imagination nationality writers | Azar Nafisi | |
| bc02268 | Only Catherine has the capacity to change and mature, although here...our heroine pays a dear price for this change. And she does take a form of revenge on both her father and her suitor: she refuses to give in to them. In the end, she has her triumph. | revenge triumph | Azar Nafisi | |
| 094714d | under circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| cb40671 | Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| c837676 | It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools-- all those places where I felt at home have joined the list of endangered species. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and my own hometown paper, The Washington Post, have all closed their weekend book review sections, leaving books orphaned and stranded, poor cousins to televi.. | reading | Azar Nafisi | |
| c3cb60f | The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 8eaee50 | Most people have a way of radiating their potential - not just what they are, but what they could become. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 538c457 | We're like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings. | funny humor love | Aimee Bender | |
| 0431d8c | Her blush was the color of a coral reef, but smooth. | coral-reef | Aimee Bender | |
| 9acd5f5 | Then there is the butterfly-or is it a moth? Humbert's inability to differentiate between the two,his indifference, implies a moral carelessness. This blind indifference echoes his callous attitude towards Lolita's nightly sobs. Those who tell us Lolita is a little vixen who deserved what she got should remember her nightly sobs in the arms of her rapist and jailer, because you see, as Humbert reminds us with a mixture of relish and pathos,.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| c73daa7 | Most serious confrontations in life are not political, they are existential. One can agree with someone's political stance but disagree in a fundamental way with how they came to that position. It is a question of attitude, of moral configuration. My husband and I had plenty of grievances, but it all boiled down to a fundamental difference in the way we perceived life, the context within which we defined ourselves and our world. For that, t.. | divorce perspective-on-life politics | Azar Nafisi | |
| 62572ce | Then he sat down at the table of a larger man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. The man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you liked to kick people around. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 556ab7c | You can ruin anything if you focus at it. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 7eafc9d | It was ridiculous, at times, how many tears one body could produce. | tears | Aimee Bender | |
| 2756bfe | This woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 9cd48bf | Twice I'd come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one's roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through her pleasure she'd heard the front door open and close. | loneliness roommates sex | Aimee Bender | |
| 67318a6 | you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an "immunity to eloquence," meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author's attitude t.. | Neil Postman | ||
| b39b3d4 | It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides. | Neil Postman | ||
| c7486f2 | there is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it. | Neil Postman | ||
| 89b41a4 | a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodat.. | Neil Postman | ||
| 56d42f6 | Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute. | Neil Postman | ||
| b441bbd | belief that where there is a problem, there must be a solution, I shall conclude with the following suggestions. We must, as a start, not delude ourselves with preposterous notions such as the straight Luddite position as outlined, for example, in Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no suggestion at .. | Neil Postman | ||
| 7ce62fe | There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first--the Orwellian--culture becomes a prison. In the second--the Huxleyan--culture becomes a burlesque. No | Neil Postman | ||
| e0bfb29 | What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. | Neil Postman | ||
| 7678e24 | The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To | Neil Postman |