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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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. | dating friendship love romance | Azar Nafisi | |
| ab54427 | I hope you never love anything as much as I love you. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 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 | ||
| 2c39f68 | she explained why all the normal acts of life had become small acts of rebellion and political insubordination to her and to other young people like her. All her life she was shielded. She was never let out of sight; she never had a private corner in which to think, to feel, to dream, to write. She was not allowed to meet any young men on her own. Her family not only instructed her on how to behave around men--they seemed to think they coul.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| d592102 | Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer. The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 6482d1d | We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent--namely ideology. This was a country where all gestures, even the most private, were interpreted in political terms. The colors of my head scarf or my father's tie were symbols of Western decadence and imperialist tendencies. Not wearing a beard, shaking hands with members of the opposi.. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| dbf5690 | Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 091ad21 | Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy--even in the books, there were few men for her. What was wrong with that? | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 247a7e2 | Sempre mantive o habito prazeroso dos tempos de faculdade, de sublinhar passagens e fazer anotacoes. Grande parte de minhas notas de Orgulho e Preconceito, A herdeira, O morro dos ventos uivantes, Madame Bovary e Tom Jones foi feita durante as noites de insonia. 224 | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 9cfd168 | The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other. | totalitarianism women-writers | Azar Nafisi | |
| d50c619 | Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson's and Chapters. | bookstores publishing reading | Azar Nafisi | |
| 4cd79d1 | We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the rule of Islam? What memories were we creating for our children? This constant assault, this persistent lack of kindness, was what frightened me most. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| f70856e | The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done. | oppression | Azar Nafisi | |
| 4816704 | Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 51a22f8 | 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 sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them... | literature | Azar Nafisi | |
| bb66dce | Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone. | reading | Azar Nafisi | |
| 5b3e7a6 | When the girls left that afternoon, they left behind the aura of their unsolved problems and dilemmas. I felt exhausted, I chose the only way I knew to cope with problems. I went to the refrigerator, scooped up the coffee ice cream. Poured some cold coffee over it, looked for walnuts, discovered we had none left, went after almonds, crushed them with my teeth and sprinkled them over my concoction. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| caa3599 | Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure. | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 1cfc961 | you cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be sib born for something as well | Azar Nafisi | ||
| 66a6945 | Equally scandalized by this election are the colorful band of lipstick jihadi Hirsi Ali wannabes who are writing one erotic fantasy after another about Iranian "women," oversexualizing Iranian politics as they opt for "love and danger" during their "honeymoon in Tehran." The representation of Iranian women in the flea market of the US publishing industry began under President Bush with Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and has now reac.. | Hamid Dabashi | ||
| 706bd43 | Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade. | Adam Smith | ||
| 1b7772b | Don't think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don't think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don't think about those last few hours on board. Snow | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| dcccc61 | A liquid movement below on the tarmac; a cat, hunting in the shadows. | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 265a869 | The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery. | Adam Smith | ||
| 73bcbd9 | her. It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside. In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. "To Arthur," they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm. Of all of them there at the bar that night, the" | Emily St. John Mandel | ||
| 90b215b | You teach them very litter?" "Why should we? It only leads to trouble and discontent. We amuse them." | neil-postman | H. G. Wells | |
| f3834c7 | the competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich. | Adam Smith | ||
| a43f16d | You're right,' said the corporal. 'It serves editors like that right. They only stir the people up. Last year when I was still only a lance-corporal I had an editor under me and he called me nothing else but a disaster for the army, but when I taught him unarmed drill and he sweated, he always used to say: "Please respect the human being in me." But I gave him hell for his human being when the order was "flat down" and there were a lot of p.. | Jaroslav Hašek | ||
| 4a07b42 | E muito mau sinal - prosseguiu Svejk - que uma pessoa comece de repente a dar-se a umas consideracoes filosoficas quaisqueres, pois isso traz sempre um cheiro a delirium tremens. | Jaroslav Hašek |