Reading Lolita in Tehran Quotes

“I left Tehran on June 24, 1997, for the green light that Gatsby once believed in.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“This had also become a ritual, to call friends and family to make sure they were safe, knowing that your own relief implied someone else’s death.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I would like to know where Mr. Bahri is right now, at this moment, and to ask him: how did it all turn out, Mr. Bahri—was this your dream, your dream of the revolution? Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memory? Who will pay for the snapshots of the murdered and the executed that we hid in our shoes and closets as we moved on to other things? Tell me, Mr. Bahri—or, to use that odd expression of Gatsby’s, Tell me, old sport—what shall we do with all these corpses on our hands?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“demonstrators were attacked by the government-backed vigilantes.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“They had not become part of the crowd who watched the executions, but they did not have the power to protest them, either. 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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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: A Memoir in Books

“And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“A novel is not an allegory . . . 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

“He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Uno di quei crepuscoli di mezza stagione, quando per un attimo l'aria pare condensare in sé estate e autunno.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Un grande romanzo acuisce le vostre percezioni, vi fa sentire la complessità della vita e degli individui, e vi difende dall'ipocrita certezza della validità delle vostre opinioni, nella morale a compartimenti stagni.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Non sminuire mai, in nessuna circostanza, un'opera letteraria cercando di trasformarla in una copia della vita reale.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“L'empatia è il cuore di Gasby, come di molti altri romanzi. Non c'è niente di più riprovevole che restare ciechi di fronte ai problemi e ai dolori altrui.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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

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

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

“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 Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“La curiosité, disait-elle, est la forme la plus pure de l'insoumission.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“L'insensibilità è 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 è equiparata all'empatia, alla capacità di immedesimazione: non possiamo vivere ciò che hanno vissuto gli altri, però in letteratura siamo in grado di comprendere anche i personaggi più mostruosi. Un bel romanzo è quello che riesce a mostrarci la complessità degli individui, e fa sì che tutti i personaggi abbiano una voce; è allora che un romanzo si può definire democratico - non perché sostiene la democrazia, ma per la sua stessa natura. L'empatia è il cuore di Gatsby, come di molti altri grandi romanzi - non c'è niente di più riprovevole che restare ciechi di fronte ai problemi e ai dolori altrui. Non vederli significa negare la loro esistenza.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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 promised that all would be different under a just Islamic rule. Islamic rule! It was a pageant of hypocrisy and shame.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books