“You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses...”

“Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go...”

“I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure th...”

“...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.”

“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 m...”

“Both Yassi and I know that we have been losing our faith. We have been questioning it with every move. During the Shah's time, it was different. I felt I was in the minority and I had to guard my f...”

“work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.”

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”