Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy—even in the books, there...
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 evi...
Under circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
أيها القاريء احتاج منك الى ان تتخيلنا فعلاً لأننا لن نظهر اذا لم تفعل
Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's wha...
We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the ru...
This was Nassrin, or to be honest, this was the two of us together: sharing the most intimate moments with a shrug, pretending they were not intimate. It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, imp...
The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, ab...
The fact is I don't know what I want, and I don't know if I am doing the right thing. I've always been told what is right—and suddenly I don't know anymore. I know what I don't want, but I don't know...
She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency.
Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionall...
It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster…I thin...
It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere o...
Could one really concentrate on one’s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condon...
American students, we are told, are falling behind in reading and math; on test after test, they score below most European students (at the level of Lithuania), and the solution, rather than seeking t...
Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to th...
A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and bec...
The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.
Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficien...
The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves as a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of s...