Reading Lolita in Tehran Quotes

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

“You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is now metal instead of wood,the walls have been painted a garish pink ,the easy chair you loved so much is gone .Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set . This is your house,and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house , to its walls and doors and floors ; you are not seen .”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection.

Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.”
― azar nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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

“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: A Memoir in Books

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

“The reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I have seen women of vastly different backgrounds take on that same expression: a hazy, lazy, flirtatious look in their eyes. . . . This sort of seduction is elusive; it is sinewy and tactile. It twists, twirls, winds and unwinds. Hands curl and uncurl while the waist seems to coil and recoil. . . . It is openly seductive but not surrendering.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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 which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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

“I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. 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: A Memoir in Books

“Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“يشجعوننا على إظهار مشاعر حبنا للإمام بأقصى أشكال التعبير مغالاة، بينما يحرّمون علينا أن نظهر أي تعبير علني عن مشاعرنا الشخصية، وأعني الحب بشكل خاص”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokovs fascinating creations, possibly a word he invented. I said I associate Upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be a name of a dance- you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me". Manna suggested that the word upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in parentheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahashid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting" Upsilamba" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And for Nassrin it was a magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. 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, desired, hated, feared?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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: A Memoir in Books

“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: 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. It was an odd way to start, but I did succeed in getting their attention. I explained that we would in the course of the semester read and discuss many different authors, but that one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness. Some, like Gorky or Gold, were overtly subversive in their political aims; others, like Fitzgerald and Mark Twain, were in my opinion more subversive, if less obviously so. I told them we would come back to this term, because my understanding of it was somewhat different from its usual definition. I 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.” 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

“We envy people like you, and we want to be you; we can't, so we destroy you.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love "Madame Bovary" and cry for Emma, why we greedily read "Lolita" as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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

“Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“عجبا! كيف يمكن للحظة انفتاح يتيمة أن تتحول إلى حرية هائلة؟”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me -- Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to "see" others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, or imposing our visions and desires on others.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“We can't all leave this country, Bijan had told me-this is our home. The world is a large place, my magician had said when I went to him with my woes. You can write and teach wherever you are. You will be read more and heard better, in fact, once you are over there. To go or not to go? In the long run, it's all very personal, my magician reasoned. I always admired your former colleague's honesty, he said. Which former colleague? Dr. A, the one who said his only reason for leaving was because he liked to drink beer freely. I am getting sick of people who cloak their personal flaws and desires in the guise of patriotic fervor. They stay because they have no means of living anywhere else, because if they leave, they won't be the big shots they are over here; but they talk about sacrifice for the homeland. And then those who do leave claim they've gone in order to criticize and expose the regime. Why all these justifications?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books