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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ac9e20c | Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. | Adam Smith | ||
| 96717e4 | No, no. Absolutely not. We had a talk with the rabbi, and now we're fully in salvage-the-bar-mitzvah mode." "You had a talk? You think talk got us out of Egypt or Entebbe? Uh-uh. Plagues and Uzis. Talk gets you a good place in line for a shower that isn't a shower." | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 2d2efa5 | if I had an answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it? | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 69f11e5 | Did I ever tell you about my last phone call?" Garrett asked. "Yes," Clark said gently. "I believe you did." Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he'd ever made was to his boss. The last words he'd spoken into a telephone were a bouquet of corporate cliches, seared horribly into memory." | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 62a89e4 | Managers should be hassle absorbers, not hassle creators. | David H. Maister | ||
| 87b9148 | It's cold in Toronto but I like where I'm living. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 94e839d | They swore at airport management, at the TSA, at the airlines, at their useless phones, furious because fury was the last defense against understanding what the news stations were reporting. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 1abf542 | Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. | Adam Smith | ||
| 0bbd5c2 | paper fell out of the book. It was a page torn from | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| d83a712 | La curiosite, disait-elle, est la forme la plus pure de l'insoumission. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| b5bf266 | Mais la magie vient du pouvoir du bien, de cette force qui nous dit que nous n'avons pas besoin de nous soumettre aux limites et restrictions que nous impose M. destin, comme l'appelle Nabokov. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| f570538 | These are my memories of Norman: red earth and fireflies, singing and demonstrating on the Oval, reading Melville, Poe, Lenin and Mao Tse Tung, reading Ovid and Shakespeare on warm spring mornings with a favorite professor, of conservative political leaning, and accompanying another in the afternoons, singing revolutionary songs. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 22aa496 | We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 5aafb4b | Almost every day, my students would recount such stories. We laughed over them, and later felt angry and sad, although we repeated them endlessly at parties and over cups of coffee, in breadlines, in taxis. It was as if the sheer act of recounting these stories gave us some control over them; the deprecating tone we used, our gestures, even our hysterical laughter seemed to reduce their hold over our lives. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 40ba294 | Later, we all wondered how it was that our concern was not so much for our lives or for the fact that five armed strangers were using our house for a shooting match with a neighbor who was also armed and hiding somewhere in our garden. We, like all normal Iranian citizens, were guilty and had something to hide: we were worried about our satellite dish. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| f8471aa | Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 44fb6b3 | Some of my girls are more radical than I am in their resentment of men. All of them want to be independent. They think they cannot find men equal to them. They think they have grown and matured, but men in their lives have not, they have not bothered to think. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 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 standards teaching | 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 |