We in ancient countries have our past- we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.
The reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do.
A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.
With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
The revolution taught me not to be consoled by other people’s miseries, not to feel thankful because so many others had suffered more. Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others.
Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.
When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?
Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
There is little consolation in the fact that millions of people are unhappier than we are. Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.
The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.
The more we die, the stronger we will become.
Art is as useful as bread.
The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.