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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f381e40 | Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 8e1781e | Non sminuire mai, in nessuna circostanza, un'opera letteraria cercando di trasformarla in una copia della vita reale. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| fe8c3d0 | In the final analysis we are our own betrayers. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 43f8883 | La curiosita e insubordinazione allo stato puro. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| b83c421 | The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 855b47a | The flip side of credit is blame. A tendency to blame others, or circumstances, is generally a recipe for unhappiness in life. | David H. Maister | ||
| 457ffd4 | Some within the government and some former revolutionaries had finally realized that there was no way the Islamic regime could make us intellectuals vanish. In forcing us underground, it had also made us more appealing, more dangerous and, in a strange way, more powerful. It had made us scarce and, because of this, also in demand. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 6bf8ebb | The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 691680b | 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. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 97d247c | After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| e357922 | 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.. | reading teaching | Azar Nafisi | |
| 0eb3103 | I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 9981143 | 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. | war | Azar Nafisi | |
| 1bf1e0a | 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. | vulnerability | Azar Nafisi | |
| 30e2413 | 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. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| ed5a6c3 | 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. | inexperience respect teaching standards | Azar Nafisi | |
| a8142d3 | And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby | Azar Nafisi | ||
| e18eae7 | 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. | self-respect | Azar Nafisi | |
| fee9f80 | 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. | reading voice | Azar Nafisi | |
| c4c7965 | 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. | sense-of-place | Azar Nafisi | |
| 1402ef3 | This is the old part of Tehran, with small spice shops, dusty narrow alleys with dry streams winding into houses with tall protective walls. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 9cb3e59 | 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.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 4515d3a | 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. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| e7c8f90 | 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 | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0957924 | 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. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0847cc0 | He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment, | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 99a9bc0 | 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." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 764280b | 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. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 2440d8b | 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. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| aa29cc9 | 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. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| ed2073c | These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 800cd1e | T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 07bd169 | Uno di quei crepuscoli di mezza stagione, quando per un attimo l'aria pare condensare in se estate e autunno. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0e388ce | 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.. | reading | Azar Nafisi | |
| 2a9c82d | 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? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| f108310 | 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. | regime totalitarianism | Azar Nafisi | |
| dfbd2ee | 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.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 64167b1 | 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? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0ae05cf | 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. | romance friendship love dating | Azar Nafisi | |
| de91247 | 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.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 0b12f94 | 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. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| b52cf38 | 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.. | hypocrisy power | Azar Nafisi | |
| 6284e97 | Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them." -- | polarization resentment | Azar Nafisi | |
| 3bf166d | She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency. | Azar Nafisi |