Maria

“...our true home, our true history, was in our poetry.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after—that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, "We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me.”
― Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“I would like to know where Mr. Bahri is right now, at this moment, and to ask him: how did it all turn out, Mr. Bahri—was this your dream, your dream of the revolution? Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memory? Who will pay for the snapshots of the murdered and the executed that we hid in our shoes and closets as we moved on to other things? Tell me, Mr. Bahri—or, to use that odd expression of Gatsby’s, Tell me, old sport—what shall we do with all these corpses on our hands?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books