Mais la magie vient du pouvoir du bien, de cette force qui nous dit que nous n’avons pas besoin de nous soumettre aux limites et restrictions que nous impose M. destin, comme l’appelle Nabokov.

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless.

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.

In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This.

We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people’s misery make us happier or more content?

Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer’s skill.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.′ So declared Yassi in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly ironic, which on rare occasions, and this was one of them, bordered on the burlesque.

Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum.

Switzerland had somehow become a bywordfor Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un- Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland.

Every now and then I find myself thinking of something my daughter told me when she was in medical school: one sign that a patient is dying is that she feels no pain.