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Quote by Azar Nafisi

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Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

In this memoir, the author reflects on her personal journey of discovering books and the profound impact they had on her life in Tehran, Iran. The narrative delves into the significance of reading forbidden literature during a time of political and social upheaval. more

Author

Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-born American writer and scholar, renowned for her experiences during the Islamic Revolution in Iran and her work 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'. She taught English literature at the University of Tehran and was forced to leave Iran after the revolution. Nafisi later moved to the United States and earned a Ph.D. from Georgetown University. more

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“Kramer's recognition, with the geologists Lees and Falcon, that people could have settled in the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers much earlier than had previously been assumed has been entirely vindicated by subsequent discoveries of the traces of 'primitive agricultural villages' dating back more than 8000 years.”

“You have the means to direct knowledge of the spiritual worlds. You have the senses that will help you to perceive these subtle spheres. It only remains for you to develop your sleeping powers. The question should not be 'is there life after death', it should be 'what am I doing to awaken my faculties to perceive the spirit worlds?”

“She slipped off the lid and took out a little hourglass hanging on a silver pivot from a black ribbon, its belly full of twinkling black sand. "Oh, it's beautiful!" "You like it." Her guardian, the antiquarian, who invested every colour, gemstone, beast, and planet with arcane and symbolic meaning, would likely give her a lecture on saturnine influences. Blanche decided not to care. "Yes, I do.”

“Thus, in criticizing fiction we must be careful to distinguish those books that satisfy our own particular unconscious needs --- the ones that make us say, 'I like this book, although I don't really know why' --- from those that satisfy the deep unconscious needs of almost everybody. The latter are undoubtedly the great stories, the ones that live on and on for generations and centuries. As long as man is man, they will go on satisfying him, giving him something that he needs to have --- a belief in justice and understanding and the allaying of anxiety. We do not know, we cannot be sure, that the real world is good. But the world of a great story is somehow good. We want to live there as often and as long as we can.”

“In reading imaginative texts, we inevitably reproduce aspects of ourselves, although this is not simply a matter of arbitrary preference or prejudice. We are all already-constituted subjects, placed in networks of power, and in reproducing ourselves it is also the latter we reproduce. To do otherwise is to risk confronting the powers that give us the sense of who we are, and to embark on the dangerous task of reconstructing ourselves along unfamiliar lines. It is, understandably, easier to use our readings to confirm those powers.”