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Book: Things I've Been Silent About
Quotes of Book: Things I've Been Silent About
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  1. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    you cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be sib born for something as well
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  2. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency.
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  3. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    This is the old part of Tehran, with small spice shops, dusty narrow alleys with dry streams winding into houses with tall protective walls.
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  4. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    I have now become something of an expert in the ways of "decisive" men. They are not firm, they just seem to be. Because they have a formula for everything, which they forcibly impose, they seem confident. But they cannot face the unexpected. They can be far less capable in a crisis than the seemingly fragile women they bully and are secretly afraid of.
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  5. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one interpretation of the faith, and to accept the new political role of the clergy. Father felt that this spelled the end of Islam in our country, and he did have a point. 'No foreign power,' he said, 'could destroy Islam the way these people have.
    book-quoteislam

  6. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.
    book-quotegrowing-upmothers-and-daughters

  7. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others.
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  8. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    I once heard my father tell a friend that his relationship with my mother reminded him of a story by Attar, the twelfth-century Persian mystic poet, about a man who fearlessly rode a ferocious lion. When the narrator followed this brave man to his home, he was shocked to see how easily he was cowed by his wife. How could a man who was not afraid of a fierce beast be so intimidated by his own wife? His host shot back: If it weren't for what happens at home I could never ride a lion.
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  9. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us-fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.
    book-quoteparents

  10. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    Why is it that in novels with a message, the villains are so reduced that it is as if they come to us with a sign on their forehead saying: Beware, I am a monster? Doesn't the Koran state that Satan is a seducer, a tempter with an insidious smile?
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  11. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting.
    book-quotewomen

  12. Azar Nafisi _ Things I've Been Silent About

    Look at these magnificent women, I thought, created in such misogynistic and hierarchical societies, yet they are the subversive centers around which the plot is shaped. Everything is supposed to revolve around the male hero. But it is the active presence of these women that changes events and diverts the man's life from its traditional course, that shocks him into changing his very mode of existence. In the classical Iranian narrative, active women dominate the scene; they make things happen.
    book-quotewomen
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