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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3d25f90 | The class's favorite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| d9736dd | What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible. | past silence | Azar Nafisi | |
| 71a366b | But it was women like Rudabeh who planted in my mind the idea of a different kind of woman whose courage is private and personal. Without making any grand claims, without aiming to save humanity or defeat the forces of Satan, these women were engaged in a quiet rebellion, courageous not because it would get them accolades, but because they could not be otherwise. If they were limited and vulnerable, it was an audacious vulnerability, transc.. | rebellion | Azar Nafisi | |
| 97e1fee | I say "then, as now" because the revolution that imposed the scarf on others did not relieve Mahshid of her loneliness. Before the revolution, she could in a sense take pride in her isolation. 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 | ||
| f0e57d4 | Look at these magnificent women, I thought, created in such misogynistic and hierarchical societies, yet they are the subversive centers around which the plot is shaped. Everything is supposed to revolve around the male hero. But it is the active presence of these women that changes events and diverts the man's life from its traditional course, that shocks him into changing his very mode of existence. In the classical Iranian narrative, act.. | women | Azar Nafisi | |
| a341398 | Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old st.. | women | Azar Nafisi | |
| 5f119db | Why is it that in novels with a message, the villains are so reduced that it is as if they come to us with a sign on their forehead saying: Beware, I am a monster? Doesn't the Koran state that Satan is a seducer, a tempter with an insidious smile? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 612f5f8 | Un romanzo non e un'allegoria, e l'esperienza sensoriale di un altro mondo. Se non entrate in quel mondo, se non trattenete il respiro insieme ai personaggi, se non vi lasciate coinvolgere nel loro destino, non arriverete mai ad identificarvi con loro, non arriverete mai al cuore del libro. E cosi che si legge un romanzo: come se fosse qualcosa da inalare, da tenere nei polmoni. Dunque, cominciate a respirare. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| dcf18a1 | In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 56bae82 | All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us--fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine. | parents | Azar Nafisi | |
| 5f80f76 | It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| a36d39a | Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 228338f | I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an.. | growing-up mothers-and-daughters | Azar Nafisi | |
| c39cda2 | the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0f93002 | 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 to immutable. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 94589b5 | A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one interpretation of the faith, and to accept the new political role of the clergy. Father felt that this spelled the end of Islam in our country, and he did have a point. 'No foreign power,' he said, 'could destroy Islam the way these people have. | islam | Azar Nafisi | |
| 3237dbe | she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| caad75e | As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, "Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves." I always associate Khomeini's death with Negar's simple pronouncement--for she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue .. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 3f10506 | I have now become something of an expert in the ways of "decisive" men. They are not firm, they just seem to be. Because they have a formula for everything, which they forcibly impose, they seem confident. But they cannot face the unexpected. They can be far less capable in a crisis than the seemingly fragile women they bully and are secretly afraid of." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 160abf0 | Primo Levi once said, "I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind." Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time." -- | Azar Nafisi | ||
| c845285 | We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin's uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality. | love sensuality | Azar Nafisi | |
| d9bb51c | That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth. | iran mourning | Azar Nafisi | |
| e57bdfb | As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor. | Neil Postman | ||
| 9950e2c | We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation. | neil postman | ||
| 3868b45 | I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words "The computer shows ..." or "The computer has determined ..." It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence "It is God's will," and the effect is roughly the same." | Neil Postman | ||
| b59c45e | Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago. | Neil Postman | ||
| eb9d235 | I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying. As | Neil Postman | ||
| b49e03a | We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years."4" | Neil Postman | ||
| 7086b34 | We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control. | Neil Postman | ||
| 34d03dd | What's wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies | Neil Postman | ||
| 4631a03 | Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief. | Neil Postman | ||
| 132ef27 | One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies. | Neil Postman | ||
| ec2fe8c | In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question. | Neil Postman | ||
| 6246575 | the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. | Neil Postman | ||
| d464b4b | Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to produce that; if students are too demoralized, bored, or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then THAT is the educational problem which has to be solved. . . That problem . . . is metaphysical in nature, not technical | self-directed-learning | Neil Postman | |
| c8c7473 | Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. | Neil Postman | ||
| 92f8493 | Wenn wir weiterhin die Wissenschaft oder die Heilige Schrift so lesen, als gaben sie uns die Wahrheit direkt und definitiv, dann werden alle darin enthaltenen Hoffnungen und Versprechen zu Staub. Eine als universelle Wahrheit, nicht als menschliche Erzahlung gelesene Wissenschaft degeneriert zu technologischer Sklaverei. Eine als universelle Wahrheit, nicht als menschliche Erzahlung gelesene Heilige Schrift degeneriert zu... was? Zu Inquisi.. | Neil Postman | ||
| 4187020 | Ich meine damit eine Geschichte. Aber nicht irgendeine Geschichte. Ich denke an grosse Erzahlungen - Erzahlungen, die tief und komplex genug sind, um Erklarungen hinsichtlich der Herkunft und der Zukunft eines Volkes zu bieten; Erzahlungen, die Ideale aufstellen, Verhaltungsregeln vorgeben, die Quellen von Autoritat benennen und durch all dies eine Dimension von Kontinuitat und Sinnhaftigkeit erzeugen. | Neil Postman | ||
| a6cba6b | The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors. | Neil Postman | ||
| 7abed2e | although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication--from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. | Neil Postman | ||
| b79683b | Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies." | Neil Postman | ||
| c67890d | if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis--a theory, a vision, a metaphor--something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned. | Neil Postman | ||
| 13a5327 | But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, w.. | Neil Postman | ||
| c516d07 | Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that. | Neil Postman |