Reading Lolita in Tehran Quotes

“As Fitzgerald puts it, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“the condemned man’s only privilege is to know the time of his death”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Suggested Reading Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December and More Die of Heartbreak Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Henry Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Henry James, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony and The Trial Katherine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown Herman Melville, The Confidence Man Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon Diane Ravitch, The Language Police Julie Salamon, The Net of Dreams Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Scheherazade, A Thousand and One Nights F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Joseph Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Reading”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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

“Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“La curiosità è insubordinazione allo stato puro.”
― 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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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

“The class's favorite
book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates
Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his
originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Incapaci di decifrare o di capire tutto ciò che fosse complicato o fuori dagli schemi, infuriati con quelli che consideravano serpi in seno, gli integralisti furono costretti a imporre le loro formule rudimentali anche alla narrativa. E così come perseguitarono i colori della realtà, cercando di adattarla al loro mondo in bianco e nero, si accanirono - al pari dei loro antagonisti ideologici - contro qualsiasi forma di interiorità in narrativa, finendo per perseguitare proprio i romanzi privi di contenuti politici. Come quelli della pericolosissima Jane Austen, ad esempio.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer’s skill.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Going away isn't going to help as much as you think. The memory stays with you, and the stain. It's not something you slough off once you leave.

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? I looked at him with some skepticism. This relationship is not equal in both good and bad ways, he continued. They have the power to kill us or flog us, but all of this only reminds them of their weakness. They must be scared out of their wits to see what's happening to their own former comrades, and to their children.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The insistence in Darcy's voice is a symptom of his passion for Elizabeth; it emerges even in their most mundane interactions. We can trace the development of Darcy's feelings for Elizabeth in the tone of his voice. This reaches its climax in the scene in which he proposes to her. His negative persistence, beginning his speech with 'In vain have I struggled. It will not do,' becomes almost violent, in part because the novel itself is so restrained and Darcy is the most restrained of all the characters.

Now, please listen carefully to that 'you.' Darcy seldom if ever addresses Elizabeth by her name, but he has a special way of saying 'you' when he addresses her a few times that makes the impersonal pronoun a term of ultimate intimacy. One should appreciate such nuances in a culture such as ours, where everyone is encouraged to demonstrate in the most exaggerated manner his love for the Imam and yet forbidden from any public articulation of private feelings, especially love.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Shouldn't he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“the world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness—a word that is central in Austen's novels but is seldom used in James's universe. What James's characters gain is self-respect.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual?”
― 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. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them…”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Our
world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our
sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city
that sprawled below.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Whoever we were—and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not—we had become the figment of someone else's dreams.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“...the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books