بریده‌های کتاب Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

I told him about my grandmother, who was the most devout Muslim I had ever known, even more than you, Mr. Bahri, and still she shunned politics. She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols. Where do your loyalties lie, Mr. Bahri, with Islam or the state?

while we were enjoying our coffee and pastries, Mitra began to tell us how she felt as she climbed up the stairs every Thursday morning. She said that step by step she could feel herself gradually leaving reality behind her, leaving the dark, dank cell she lived in to surface for a few hours into open air and sunshine.

What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then.

Whoever we were - and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not- we have become the figment of someone else’s dream.

What shall we do with all these corpses on our hands…

These girls, my girls, knew a great deal about Jane Austen, they could discuss Joyce and Woolf intelligently, but they knew next to nothing about their own bodies, about what they should expect of these bodies which, they had been told, were the source of all temptation.

“The first thing you should do to test your compatibility,” said Nassrin, “is dance with him

As Fitzgerald puts it, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

Our class was shaped within this context, in an attempt to escape the gaze of the blind censor for a few hours each week.

.readers were born free and ought to remain free

Learn from Gatsby, from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flesh and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.

I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.