Reading Lolita in Tehran Quotes

“Quel giorno avevo una sensazione struggente, come di un lutto anticipato. Ciò che avevo di più caro era stato schiacciato come un prato di fiori di campo, raso al suolo per fare posto a un giardino ben curato. Neppure quando studiavo negli Stati Uniti avevo mai provato nulla del genere. In tutti quegli anni mi ero tenuta saldamente aggrappata alla certezza che la mia casa, il mio paese mi appartanevano, e potevo tornarci ogni volta che volevo. E fu solo quando infine vi feci ritorno che compresi il vero significato dell'esilio. Camminando per quelle strade che amavo e ricordavo con tanto affetto, era come se stessi calpestando i miei ricordi.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Un romanzo non è un'allegoria” dissi verso la fine della lezione “È l'esperienza sensoriale di un altro mondo. Se non entrate in quel mondo, se non trattenete il respiro insieme ai personaggi, se non vi lasciate coinvolgere nel loro destino, non arriverete mai a indentificarvi con loro, non arriverete mai al cuore del libro. È così che si legge un romanzo: come se fosse qualcosa da inalare, da tenere nei polmoni. Dunque, cominciate a respirare. Ricordate solo questo. È tutto; potete andare.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“To whom do we tell what happened on the
Earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge
Mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up
And will stay so? Czeslaw Milosz, “Annalena”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“This was a period of hope, true, but we harbor the illusion that times of hope are devoid of tensions and conflict when, in my experience, they are the most dangerous.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It looked white and innocent enough, like a child who has just committed a murder.”
― 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

“... the war came out of nowhere one mild fall morning: unexpected, unwelcome, and utterly senseless.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memories?”
― 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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“He wanted to fulfil 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 a dream?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Gatsby is constantly being made and remade by others.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Are people not a little more complex than that? And are revolutionaries devoid of personal feelings and emotions? Do they never fall in love, or enjoy beauty?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Careless is the first adjective that comes to mind when describing the rich in this novel. The dream they embody is an alloyed dream that destroys whoever tries to get close to it.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Our dear prosecutor has committed the fallacy of getting too close to the amusement park,' she said. 'He can no longer distinguish fiction from reality.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“He repeated that people had to pay for their past crimes. This is not a game, he said. It is a revolution... we all have to pay in the end. There are no innocents in the game of life, that's for sure.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“... at the time we had not yet realized just how far we had betrayed our dreams.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I remember at the time that Bijan's was one lone voice in support of Bakhtiar, while all others, including mine, were only demanding destruction of the old, without much thought to the consequences.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I wanted to remember everything. Their faces, despite their terrible last moments, were forced to assume the peaceful indifference of death. But what amount of helplessness and desperation did those awful calm faces inspire in us, the survivors?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“He would stand with a gun in one hand and offer the sermon of the week...”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“... there on the brink of the void, I could invent the violin or be devoured by the void.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Unlike in other utopian novels, the forces of evil here are not omnipotent; Nabokov shows us their frailty as well. They are ridiculous and can be defeated, and this does not lessen the tragedy- the waste.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us.”
― 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

“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

“In Austen’s novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place. Like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I went about my way rejoicing, thinking how wonderful it is to be a woman and a writer at the end of the twentieth century.”
― 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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books