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What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat

We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.

Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more...

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned...

She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.

Empathy is Gasby's heart, like many other novels. There is nothing more reproven than being blind in the face of the problems and pains of others.

The class went all right, and the ones after became easier. I was enthusiastic, naive and idealistic, and I was in love with my books.

I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.

It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were respected and understood.

The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me.

As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, "Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their...

The class's favoritebook was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through hisoriginality in...

Curiosity, she said, is the purest form of rebellion.

After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.

Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?

But the magic comes from the power of good, from this force which tells us that we do not need to submit to the limits and restrictions imposed on us by Mr. Destin, as Nabokov calls him.

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...

Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others.

These are my memories of Norman: red earth and fireflies, singing and demonstrating on the Oval, reading Melville, Poe, Lenin and Mao Tse Tung, reading Ovid and Shakespeare on warm spring mornings...

We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned...

she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.

I say "then, as now" because the revolution that imposed the scarf on others did not relieve Mahshid of her loneliness. Before the revolution, she could in a sense take pride in her isolation. At that...

Primo Levi once said, I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind. Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.

That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate on life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.

Some within the government and some former revolutionaries had finally realized that there was no way the Islamic regime could make us intellectuals vanish. In forcing us underground, it had also made...

The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction.

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...

correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and...

Some of my girls are more radical than I am in their resentment of men. All of them want to be independent. They think they cannot find men equal to them. They think they have grown and matured, but...

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...