Jouwani Mahdyar by Aghajani featuring Bahman Ghobadi (from No One Knows About Persian Cats)
You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.
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| — | From Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi |
You know, I feel all my life has been a series of departures.
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| — | From Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi |
Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me-Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to “see” others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.
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| — | From Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi |
I was scared of some lack, as if the future were receding from me.
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| — | From Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi |
I had a feeling that day that I was losing something, that I was mourning a death that had not yet occurred. I felt as if all things personal were being crushed like small wildflowers to make way for a more ornate garden, where everything would be tame and organized. I had never felt this sense of loss…My yearning was tied to the certainty that home was mine for the having, that I could go back anytime I wished. It was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile. As I walked those dearly beloved, dearly remembered streets, I felt I was squashing the memories that lay underfoot.
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| — | From Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi |
