She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
Razieh had an amazing capacity for beauty. She said, You know, all my life I have lived inpoverty. I had to steal books and sneak into movie houses-but, God, I loved those books! I don't think any ric...
Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in...
La curiosité, disait-elle, est la forme la plus pure de l'insoumission.
Imagine you are walking down a leafy path…The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm. Is...
I once heard my father tell a friend that his relationship with my mother reminded him of a story by Attar, the twelfth-century Persian mystic poet, about a man who fearlessly rode a ferocious lion. W...
How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?
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 e...
You don't understand their mentality. They won't accept your resignation because they don't think you have the right to quit. They are the ones who decide how long you should stay and when you should...
We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent—namely ideology. This was a country where a...
Un grande romanzo acuisce le vostre percezioni, vi fa sentire la complessità della vita e degli individui, e vi difende dall'ipocrita certezza della validità delle vostre opinioni, nella morale a comp...
These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inwa...
She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.
Quel giorno avevo una sensazione struggente, come di un lutto anticipato. Ciò che avevo di più caro era stato schiacciato come un prato di fiori di campo, raso al suolo per fare posto a un giardino be...
Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark, Baldwin said in an interview in 1961. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how...
Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect.
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.
Looking back on that time it seems to me that such rapture over Tarkovsky by an audience most of whom would not have known how to spell his name, and who would under normal circumstances have ignored...
It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the institution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony.
In his forward to the English edition of Invitation to a Beheading (1959), Nabokov reminds the reader that his novel does not offer 'tout pour tous.' Nothing of the kind. 'It is,' he claims, 'a violin...