The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own...
The class's favoritebook was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through hisoriginality in...
The class went all right, and the ones after became easier. I was enthusiastic, naive and idealistic, and I was in love with my books.
Teaching is a funny business; you want to share these glimpses of something real and profound, but half the time students want only to know their next assignment and what they will need to study for t...
She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Me...
Primo Levi once said, I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind. Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.
Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others.
Ourworld in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became oursanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the citythat spr...
One can believe James's claim to an imagination of disaster; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such...
It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice...forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet deny...
In the Damascus airport she had been humiliated by what she was assumed to be, and when she returned home, she felt angry because of what she could have been.
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
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 affirmation lies in the way...
Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.
I eat my heart out alone.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressi...
He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment,
Dicono che il privato è politico; non è vero, naturalmente. Anzi, al centro della lotta per i diritti politici c'è proprio il desiderio di proteggere noi stessi, di impedire al politico di intrometter...
Chi sa ballare alla persiana? domando. Tutte si voltano a guardare Sanaz. Lei si schermisce, fa di no con la tessta. Cominciamo ad insistere, a incoraggiarla, formiamo un cerchio intorno a lei. Quando...