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161 " Dicono che il privato è politico; non è vero, naturalmente. Anzi, al centro della lotta per i diritti politici c'è proprio il desiderio di proteggere noi stessi, di impedire al politico di intromettersi nella vita privata. Pubblico e privato sono legati da un rapporto di interdipendenza, ma ciò non significa che siano la stessa cosa. Il regno dell'immaginazione è come un ponte che li modifica di continuo l'uno rispetto all'altro. Il re filosofo di Platone lo sapeva, e così il nostro censore cieco; non c'è quindi da stupirsi che il primo obiettivo della Repubblica Islamica fosse quello di eliminare il confine tra i due ambiti, finendo per distruggerli entrambi. "
― Azar Nafisi , Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
162 " That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was an odd way to start, but I did succeed in getting their attention. I explained that we would in the course of the semester read and discuss many different authors, but that one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness. "
163 " Could one really concentrate on one’s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery? "
164 " It is because 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 inward that makes them whole. "
165 " The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe. "
166 " The fact is I don't know what I want, and I don't know if I am doing the right thing. I've always been told what is right—and suddenly I don't know anymore. I know what I don't want, but I don't know what I want,' she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched. "
167 " When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream? "
168 " Shouldn't he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress? "
169 " Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable. "
― Azar Nafisi , The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
170 " the world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors. "
171 " It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the institution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony. "
172 " Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires. "
173 " 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. "
174 " How could God be so cruel as to create a Muslim woman with so much flesh and so little sex appeal? "
175 " She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves. "
176 " These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards. "
177 " The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. "
178 " Teaching is a funny business; you want to share these glimpses of something real and profound, but half the time students want only to know their next assignment and what they will need to study for the test. "
179 " Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it. "
180 " It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing. The realm of imagination is a bridge between them, constantly refashioning one in terms of the other. Plato's philosopher-king knew this and so did the blind censor, so it was perhaps not surprising that the Islamic Republic's first task had been to blur the lines and boundaries between the personal and the political, thereby destroying both. "