Sara’s Reviews > Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books > Status Update

"I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt..."

"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."

"First, none of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them."

"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; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really."

"It's frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your own decisions."

"Only if I take my own life can I act without my husband's permission, she said, desperately and dramatically."

"Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world - not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires."

"You used to preach to us all that she[Austen] ignored politics, not because she didn't know any better but because she didn't allow her work, her imagination, to be swallowed up by the society around her.At a time when the world was engulfed in the NapoleonicWars, she created her own independent world, a world that you, two centuries later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, teach as the fictional ideal of democracy."

"This was a period of hope, true, but we harbor the illusion that times of hope are devoid of tensions and conflicts when, in my experience, they are just as dangerous. Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power - the ones who had taken it away - become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive."

....All we need was to read and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. This was where Austen's danger lay."