Reading Lolita in Tehran Quotes

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Do not, under any 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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels--the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Imagine you are walking down a leafy path…The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm. Is it raining? You look up. The sky is still deceptively sunny…seconds later another drop. Then, with the sun still perched in the sky, you are drenched in a shower of rain. This is how memories invade me, abruptly and unexpectedly…”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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. . .”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“الانسحاب الى احلامنا قد يكون خطراً”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“I eat my heart out alone.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“We in ancient countries have our past- we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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 of Gatsby, like so many other great novels - the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster…I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen…”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“The more we die, the stronger we will become”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“I'm a perfectly equipped failure.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Poshlust, Nabokov explains, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran