Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir In Books Quotes
"One persistent male student, although barred from our class, insisted on his rights."
"What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."
"Their absences persist, like an acute pain that seems to have no physical source."
"Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self."
"Our world in that living room became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city."
"We read Persian classical literature, along with Western classics."
"Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn’t dare to imagine ourselves."
"I wanted to teach a handful of selected students wholly committed to the study of literature."
"I wanted to create a special class, one that would give me the freedoms denied me in the classes I taught in the Islamic Republic."
"Like the best defense attorneys, who dazzle with their rhetoric and appeal to our higher sense of morality, Humbert exonerates himself by implicating his victim."
"You do see how Nabokov’s prose provides trapdoors for the unsuspecting reader."
"In the case of Lolita, he never succeeds in possessing her willingly, so that every act of lovemaking from then on becomes a crueler and more tainted act of rape."
"Were he to paint the murals in the Enchanted Hunters, 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.'"
"Before the reader makes his judgment about either Humbert or our own blind censor, I must remind him that at some point Humbert addresses his audience as 'Reader! Bruder!'"
"This is how things were in those first days of the revolution, when I innocently started my teaching career."
"The look of surprise tinged with leniency... A funny child, who needs to be guided and sometimes put in her place."
"All my memories of those first years revolve around the University of Tehran."
"With my small collection of books, I was like an emissary from a land that did not exist, with a stock of dreams."
"In the midst of feverish preparation, I would be summoned for matters that had nothing to do with my classes."
"That was the first time I experienced the desperate, orgiastic pleasure of public mourning."
"The night before my first class I was very nervous, like a child on her first day of school."
"Memory has given them gargantuan proportions they probably didn’t have in reality."
"Those were crucial days in Iranian history. A battle was being fought over the soul of the new regime."
"It now seems amazing to me, as I relate the events of those years, how focused I was on my work."
"That class went all right, and the ones after it became easier. I was enthusiastic, naïve and idealistic."
"I felt a certain distance from most of my students... as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans."
"The only way I could give rhyme or rhythm to my life was to read my books and work up my confused classes."
"I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel."
"The novel was moral when it shook us out of our stupor and made us confront the absolutes we believe in."
"It was only at night and in my diary that my growing desperation, my nightmares, poured out uninhibited."
"In the opaque glow of hindsight, Mahtab’s face slowly fades and is transformed into the image of another girl."
"I felt a silent defiance that may also have shaped my public desire to defend a vague and amorphous entity I thought of as myself."
"It was obvious that Jeff was lonely... he needed to talk to someone who spoke his language."
"I had started having nightmares and sometimes woke up screaming, mainly because I felt I would never again be able to leave the country."
"Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels—the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains."
"You don’t read Gatsby to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are."
"A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic."
"This carelessness, a lack of empathy, appears in Jane Austen’s negative characters."
"The dream they embody is an alloyed dream that destroys whoever tries to get close to it."
"The city, like Daisy, has in it a promise, a mirage that when reached becomes debased and corrupted."
"Gatsby’s loyalty was to his reinvented self, which saw its fulfillment in Daisy’s voice."
"Gatsby cannot tolerate the shabbiness of his life. He has an 'extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness'."
"This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then."
"I did not feel brave at all; the seeming tranquillity was due to an anxiety so paralyzing that it translated itself into calm."
"Mrs. Rezvan is a phenomenon in her own right: if she didn’t exist, we would have to invent her."
"What I cannot describe is her energy, which seemed to be caged inside her body."
"It is such a privilege to meet you, I want to become your student."
"The superiority you discern in me announces my futility."
"Feel, feel, I say—feel for all you’re worth, even if it half kills you."
"This was the welcoming gift I received on my formal return to academia."
"A WOMAN IN A VEIL IS PROTECTED LIKE A PEARL IN AN OYSTER SHELL."
"We could not openly articulate what we wished, but we could by our silence show our indifference."
"I thought certain standards were expected and understood."
"Most of these girls have never had anyone praise them for anything."
"You must think about where we are coming from."
"They love this class, they even learned to love Catherine Sloper."
"In these revolutionary times, they care even more."
"I don’t think any rich kid has ever cherished Rebecca or Gone with the Wind the way I did."
"We envy people like you and we want to be you; we can’t, so we destroy you."
"I don’t remember her last name, but her first name I can use without having to worry about security, because she is dead."
"Dr. Sloper doubts Morris Townsend’s honorable intentions towards his daughter."
"Catherine learns, painfully, to stand up to each and every one of them."
"What James’s characters gain is self-respect."
"Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves."
"The Islamic Republic has taken us back to Jane Austen’s times."
"Whether we kill or are killed, we are victorious."
"After all, an event like this happens only once in a lifetime, doesn’t it?"
"This was what Austen demanded of her readers."
"The whole structure of the novel is like a dance, which is both a public and a private act."
"Darcy’s view of Elizabeth pans in to a close-up; in the second part of the novel, the reverse happens as Elizabeth moves closer to Darcy."
"Austen’s protagonists are private individuals set in public places."
"There is a give-and-take in the dance, a constant adapting to the partner’s needs and steps."
"Austen’s ability to create such multivocality, such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one of the best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel."
"This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy."
"The centrality of dialogue in Pride and Prejudice fits well into the dancelike structure of the novel."
"The war with Iraq had ended, but the government continued its war against internal enemies, against those it considered to be representatives of cultural decadence and Western influence."
"The realm of imagination is a bridge between [the personal and political], constantly refashioning one in terms of the other."
"The first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience."
"In Austen’s novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist."
"It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen’s novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others."
"Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing."
"The backward-and-forward rhythm of the dance is repeated in the actions and movements of the two protagonists, around whom the plot is shaped."
"The balance between the public and the private is essential to this world."
"In the mid-nineties, in an effort to reach out to Europe, a number of Western intellectuals were invited to Iran."
"This came partly from the fact that, unlike his more militant friends, he was not a confrontational person."
"His area of expertise—pre-Islamic Iran—was hated by the Islamic regime."
"We obsessively resurrected and evoked the manner of death as reported by the officials."
"Austen’s theme is cruelty not under extraordinary circumstances but ordinary ones, committed by people like us."
"It’s frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions."
"The meaning of the Revolution was that Russia had attempted to isolate itself from the ordeal of modern consciousness."
"I am going to leave, I told myself. I can’t live like this anymore."
"We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had."
"We are not with the regime in our hearts and minds, one had said, but what can we do but comply?"
"The fact that he was taking it so graciously made me feel guilty and hesitant."
"We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it."