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The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.

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

those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.

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 have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the...

It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for...

She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.

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...

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...

It's frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.

It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster…I...

You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ

A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates...

You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is...

There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I...

They encourage us to show the feelings of our love for the Imam in the utmost exaggeration forms, while they are forbidden to show any public expression of our personal feelings, and I mean love in...

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...

i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a...

Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?

Imagine you are walking down a leafy path…The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm....

It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved...

We envy people like you, and we want to be you; we can't, so we destroy you.

A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and...

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

Withdrawal to our dreams may be dangerous

You don't understand their mentality. They won't accept your resignation because they don't think you have the right to quit. They are the ones who decide how long you should stay and when you should...

The more we die, the stronger we will become

Empathy lies at the heart of , like so many other great novels--the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

Each of us harbors within him a Judas for his own Christ

Poshlust, Nabokov explains, is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...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...

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...