L'insensibilità è tipica anche dei personaggi negativi di Jane Austen: Lady Catherine, Mrs Norris, Mr Collins o i Crawford. Il tema ricorre inoltre nell'opera di Henry James e negli eroi-mostro di Nab...
I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclon...
Do not, under any 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.
Did you ever dream this could happen to us? He said, No I didn't, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right...
Almost every day, my students would recount such stories. We laughed over them, and later felt angry and sad, although we repeated them endlessly at parties and over cups of coffee, in breadlines, in...
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...
She felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes.
The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed -...
Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. A native of America who cannot...
I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cit...
I say then, as now because the revolution that imposed the scarf on others did not relieve Mahshid of her loneliness. Before the revolution, she could in a sense take pride in her isolation. At that t...
I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the f...
How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?
Empathy lies at the heart of , like so many other great novels--the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
Einstein was articulate and well-read, a lover of classical music, and it was he who said, I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Kn...
Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.
Dreams,Mr.Nazari,are perfect ideals,complete in themselves.
Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.