Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms...
After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public—seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends—shifted to private homes. It was refres...
A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be abl...
Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it as an instrument of control in the same way that in Mao's China people were wearing M...
فكلّ منا يضمُر في داخله يهوذا لمسيحه الخاص
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
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...
Uno di quei crepuscoli di mezza stagione, quando per un attimo l'aria pare condensare in sé estate e autunno.
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...
Stories are not mere flights of fantasy or instruments of political power and control. They link us to our past, provide us with critical insight into the present and enable us to envision our lives n...
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.
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.
Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it.
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...
Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine will suddenly give way to showers and storms.
Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an illegal dream. He had been dreaming that he was at the sea...
La curiosité, disait-elle, est la forme la plus pure de l'insoumission.