Reading Lolita in Tehran Quotes

“The Islamic Republic has taken us back to Jane Austen’s times. God bless the arranged marriage! Nowadays, girls marry either because their families force them, or to get green cards, or to secure financial stability, or for sex—they marry for all kinds of reasons, but rarely for love.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“dispensable object. I decided to buy it for my magician. I had a theory that some gifts should be bought for their own sake, exactly because they were useless.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Everyone has gone postmodern. They can’t even read the text in the original—they’re so dependent on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his “independence of thought,” which enabled the artist to enjoy the “aggression of infinite modes of being.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“His critics, like H. G. Wells, blamed him for his mandarin attitude towards life, which prevented him from any involvement with the social and political issues of the day.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“When two of my cousins were killed by the Islamic regime, some of my relatives who were now on the side of the government called my uncle to congratulate him on the death of his son and daughter-in-law.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“In The Tragic Muse, James explains that his goal in writing is to produce “art as a human complication and social stumbling block,”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“He also recommended that women dress properly when sleeping, so that if their houses were hit, they would not be “indecently exposed to strangers’ eyes.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“That was when the myth of America started to take hold of Iran. Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Long-haired preachers come out every night
And they tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
And when you ask them for something to eat
They tell you in voices so sweet:
You will eat by and by, in that glorious place in the sky
Work and pray, live on hay, you will get pie in sky when you die.
That’s a lie!”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“didn’t value books (“the problem with you and your family is that you live more in books than in reality”),”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Well, that is the crux of the great novels,” Manna added, “like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, or James’s for that matter—the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Much later, when I read a sentence by Nabokov—“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“(“We are not against cinema,” Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, “we are against prostitution!”)”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms. It was unpredictable: the regime would go through cycles of some tolerance, followed by a crackdown. Now, after a period of relative calm and so-called liberalization, we had again entered a time of hardships.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“She constantly surprises him, because he does not really know her. He underestimates Catherine,”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“All his life had been a struggle for power—not political power, which he disdained, but the power of culture. For him culture and civilization were everything. He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his “independence of thought,” which enabled the artist to enjoy the “aggression of infinite modes of being.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“They come from a long line of defiant heroines, including Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre. These women create the main complications of the plot, through their refusal to comply. They are more complicated than the later, more obviously revolutionary, heroines of the twentieth century, because they make no claims to be radical.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Ever since Clarissa Harlow and Sophia Western—two modest and seemingly obedient daughters—refused to marry men they did not love, they changed the course of narrative and laid open to question the most basic institutions of their times, beginning with marriage.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Another, with a flash of insight, turned to me and said, “You know, Professor, he is one of those people who have a knack for becoming legendary. I mean, they cannot be ignored.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Yet in fact he fails on both fronts. In the case of Lolita, he never succeeds in possessing her willingly, so that every act of lovemaking from then on becomes a crueler and more tainted act of rape; she evades him at every turn. And he fails to completely seduce the reader, or some readers at least. Again ironically, his ability as a poet, his own fancy prose style, exposes him for what he is.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Sentence by sentence and word by word, Humbert destroys Charlotte even as he describes her: “She was obviously one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or a bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books