Reading Lolita in Tehran Quotes

“Things are definitely better for men, said Azin. Look at the marriage and divorce laws; look at how many so-called secular men have taken second wives. Especially some of the intellectuals, said Manna, those who make the headlines with their claims about freedom and all that.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“You know the rules, he said. Unaccompanied women cannot sit in this section.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“everybody leaves,” said Mahshid, her eyes glued to the floor, “who will help make something of this country? How can we be so irresponsible?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Only if I take my own life can I act without my husband’s permission, she said, desperately and dramatically.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Now that the mullahs ruled the land, religion was used as an instrument of power, an ideology. It was this ideological approach to faith that differentiated those in power from millions of ordinary citizens, believers like Mahshid, Manna and Yassi, who found the Islamic Republic their worst enemy.”
― 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. The realm of imagination is a bridge between them, constantly refashioning one in terms of the other. Plato’s”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It was then that the myth of Islamic feminism—a contradictory notion, attempting to reconcile the concept of women’s rights with the tenets of Islam—took root.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the personal or private.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Quotations from Ayatollah Khomeini—WHETHER WE KILL OR ARE KILLED WE SHALL BE VICTORIOUS! OUR UNIVERSITIES MUST BE ISLAMIZED! THIS WAR HAS BEEN A DIVINE BLESSING FOR US!—accompany the pictures.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“only two forces in the world, the army of God and that of Satan.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“It was not the worst war in the world, although it left over a million dead and injured. At first the war seemed to pull the divided country together: we were all Iranian and the enemy had attacked our homeland. But even in this, many were not allowed to participate fully. From the regime’s point of view, the enemy had attacked not just Iran; it had attacked the Islamic Republic, and it had attacked Islam.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The University of Tehran had become the seat of too much disappointment, too much sorrow and hurt. Never again would I rush so innocently, so eagerly, to a class as I did in those days at the dawn of the revolution.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“The fear was not of bullets: they were too immediate. I was scared of some lack, as if the future were receding from me.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“We have been talking about what Gatsby is all about and we’ve mentioned some themes, but there is an overall undercurrent to the novel which I think determines its essence and that is the question of loss, the loss of an illusion.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil . . .”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“There was a very brief period, between the time the Shah left on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 1, when one of the nationalist leaders, Dr. Shahpour Bakhtiar, had become the prime minister. Bakhtiar was perhaps the most democratic-minded and farsighted of the opposition leaders of that time, who, rather than rallying to his side, had fought against him and joined up with Khomeini. He had immediately disbanded Iran’s secret police and set the political prisoners free. In rejecting Bakhtiar and helping to replace the Pahlavi dynasty with a far more reactionary and despotic regime, both the Iranian people and the intellectual elites had shown at best a serious error in judgment. 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

“Leftists’ mustaches covered their upper lips, to distinguish them from the Muslims, who carved out a razor-thin line between upper lip and mustache. Some Muslims also grew beards or what stubble they could muster. The leftist women wore khaki or dull green—large, loose shirts over loose trousers—and the Muslim girls scarves or chadors. In between these two immutable rivers stood the non-political students, who were all mechanically branded as monarchists.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Criminals should not be tried. The trial of a criminal is against human rights. Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known that they were criminals,” proclaimed Ayatollah Khomeini, responding to protests by international human rights organizations of the wave of executions that followed the revolution.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Do you remember how on TV they cut Ophelia from the Russian version of Hamlet?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”—the verdict against my father came to my mind.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Of course, all murderers and all oppressors have a long list of grievances against their victims, only most are not as eloquent as Humbert Humbert.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Were he to paint the murals in the Enchanted Hunters, the motel where he first raped her, he tells us, he would have painted a lake, an arbor in flames and finally there would have been “a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.” (Child, please remember, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, although this child, had she lived in the Islamic Republic, would have been long ripe for marriage to men older than Humbert.)”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“This is how I read Lolita. 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

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

“At some point, the truth of Iran’s past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita’s is to Humbert. It became immaterial in the same way that Lolita’s truth, her desires and life, must lose color before Humbert’s one obsession, his desire to turn a twelve-year-old unruly child into his mistress.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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

“Was it any consolation, and did we even wish to remember, that what he did to us was what we allowed him to do?”
― 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 call slim-wasted: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 and indication of the brewer's skill.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books