Quotes from Azar Nafisi

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.

All his life had been a struggle for power—not political power, which he disdained, but the power of culture. For him culture and civilization were everything. He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his "independence of thought," which enabled the artist to enjoy the "aggression of infinite modes of being.

Mais la magie vient du pouvoir du bien, de cette force qui nous dit que nous n'avons pas besoin de nous soumettre aux limites et restrictions que nous impose M. destin, comme l'appelle Nabokov.

these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.

Lolita diventa il prodotto del sogno di qualcun altro.

She constantly surprises him, because he does not really know her. He underestimates Catherine

L'empatia è il cuore di Gasby, come di molti altri romanzi. Non c'è niente di più riprovevole che restare ciechi di fronte ai problemi e ai dolori altrui.

These are my memories of Norman: red earth and fireflies, singing and demonstrating on the Oval, reading Melville, Poe, Lenin and Mao Tse Tung, reading Ovid and Shakespeare on warm spring mornings with a favorite professor, of conservative political leaning, and accompanying another in the afternoons, singing revolutionary songs.

It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were respected and understood.

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby

am reminded of James Baldwin's claim that "Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.

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.

He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else.

I had come to a conclusion: our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it. It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key.

didn't value books ("the problem with you and your family is that you live more in books than in reality")

Long-haired preachers come out every night And they tell you what's wrong and what's right And when you ask them for something to eat They tell you in voices so sweet: You will eat by and by, in that glorious place in the sky Work and pray, live on hay, you will get pie in sky when you die. That's a lie!

This era is overwhelmed by violence both in rhetoric and reality, communicating not through inclusion but elimination.

To be a victim is to abdicate responsibility, to in effect give up most of all on yourself.

In The Tragic Muse, James explains that his goal in writing is to produce "art as a human complication and social stumbling block

We in this country have lost the art of engaging with the opposition.

This is the old part of Tehran, with small spice shops, dusty narrow alleys with dry streams winding into houses with tall protective walls.

La mia generazione aveva assaggiato la libertà individuale e l'aveva perduta; per quanto questo fosse doloroso, c'era comunque il ricordo a proteggerci dal deserto del presente. Le nuove generazioni, invece, su che cosa potevano contare? I loro desideri, la loro voglia di esprimersi si manifestavano nei modi più bizzarri.

Because her name is not Lolita; her real name is Dolores, which as you know in Latin means `dolor.' So her real name is associated with sorrow and with anguish and with innocence. While Lolita becomes a sort of lightheaded, seductive and airy name, the Lolita of our novel is both of these at the same time. And in our culture here today, we only associate it with one aspect of that little girl, and the crassest interpretation of her.

Right now books are in danger. One can go a step further and say that imagination and ideas are in danger, and whenever they are threatened, we know that our reality is similarly in danger.