Reading Lolita in Tehran Quotes

“She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves. It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche had said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Switzerland had somehow become a bywordfor Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un- Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Sempre mantive o hábito prazeroso dos tempos de faculdade, de sublinhar passagens e fazer anotações. Grande parte de minhas notas de Orgulho e Preconceito, A herdeira, O morro dos ventos uivantes, Madame Bovary e Tom Jones foi feita durante as noites de insônia. 224”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“There, in jail, we dreamed of just being outside, free, but when I came out, I discovered that I missed the solidarity we had in jail, the sense of purpose, the way we tried to share memories and food. She said, More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen's novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment,”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent—namely ideology. This was a country where all gestures, even the most private, were interpreted in political terms. The colors of my head scarf or my father's tie were symbols of Western decadence and imperialist tendencies. Not wearing a beard, shaking hands with members of the opposite sex, clapping or whistling in public meetings, were likewise considered Western and therefore decadent, part of the plot by imperialists to bring down our culture.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Did you ever dream this could happen to us? He said, No I didn't, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“A novel is not an allegory...it is a 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. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.”
― 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 to immutable.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“..."readers were born free and ought to remain free.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“هذا ما تعنيه لي طهران حقاً : فغيابها يبدو أكثر حقيقة وعمقاً من حضورها”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.”
― 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. I just want you to remember this.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“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

“I have two things to say to that, he said. 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. And second, you always talk about the effect of "these people" on you. Have you ever thought about your effect on them?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The class went all right, and the ones after became easier. I was enthusiastic, naive and idealistic, and I was in love with my books.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Then there is the butterfly-or is it a moth? Humbert's inability to differentiate between the two,his indifference, implies a moral carelessness. This blind indifference echoes his callous attitude towards Lolita's nightly sobs. Those who tell us Lolita is a little vixen who deserved what she got should remember her nightly sobs in the arms of her rapist and jailer, because you see, as Humbert reminds us with a mixture of relish and pathos,
"she had absolutely nowhere else to go."
This came to mind when we were discussing in our class Humbert's confiscation of Lolita's life.
The first thing that struck us in reading Lolita-in fact it was on the very first page-was how Lolita
was given to us as Humbert's creature. We only see her in passing glimpses. "What I had madly
possessed," he informs us, "was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita-perhaps,
more real than Lolita . . . having no will, no consciousness-indeed no real life of her own."
Humbert pins Lolita by first naming her, a name that becomes the echo of his desires.
To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own,
turning Lolita into a reincarnation of his lost, unfulfilled young love.
Humbert's solipsization of Lolita.
Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert's attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her
history. Lolita has a tragic past, with a dead father and a dead two-year-old brother. And now also a dead mother. Like my students, Lolita's past comes to her not so much as a loss but as a lack, and like my students, she becomes a figment in someone else's dream.

When I think of Lolita, I think of that half-alive butterfly pinned to the wall. The butterfly is not
an obvious symbol, but it does suggest that Humbert fixes Lolita in the same manner that the
butterfly is fixed; he wants her, a living breathing human being, to become stationary, to give up
her life for the still life he offers her in return. Lolita's image is forever associated in the minds of her readers with that of her jailer. Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life
through her prison bars.
This is how I read Lolita. Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class. 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

“Almost every day, my students would recount such stories. We laughed over them, and later felt angry and sad, although we repeated them endlessly at parties and over cups of coffee, in breadlines, in taxis. It was as if the sheer act of recounting these stories gave us some control over them; the deprecating tone we used, our gestures, even our hysterical laughter seemed to reduce their hold over our lives.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Un roman, n'est pas une allégorie, ai-je conclu. C'est l'expérience, à travers nos propres sens, d'un autre monde. Si vous n'entrez pas dans ce monde, si vous ne retenez pas votre souffle en même temps que les personnages qui le peuplent, si vous ne vous impliquez pas dans ce qui va leur arriver, vous ne connaîtrez pas l'empathie, et l'empathie est au cœur du roman. Voilà comment il faut lire la fiction, en inhalant l’expérience qu'elle vous propose. Alors commencez à inspirer.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books