Azar Quotes

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 you'll never be this way ever again.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

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 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 evil.

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 unconditionally.

I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.

None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, 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.

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.

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

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

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 evil.

Art is as useful as bread.

[A] novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.

Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elige y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mí para dibujarla con mi mano por tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja. Me miras, de cerca me miras, cada vez más de cerca y entonces jugamos al cíclope, nos miramos cada vez más de cerca y nuestros ojos se agrandan, se acercan entre sí, se superponen y los cíclopes se miran, respirando confundidos, las bocas se encuentran y luchan tibiamente, mordiéndose con los labios, apoyando apenas la lengua en los dientes, jugando en sus recintos donde un aire pesado va y viene con un perfume viejo y un silencio. Entonces mis manos buscan hundirse en tu pelo, acariciar lentamente la profundidad de tu pelo mientras nos besamos como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de movimientos vivos, de fragancia oscura. Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa instantánea muerte es bella. Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mí como una luna en el agua.

There is little consolation in the fact that millions of people are unhappier than we are. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?

Supe entonces, con humildad, con perplejidad, en un arranque de mexicanidad absoluta, que estábamos gobernados por el azar y que en esa tormenta todos nos ahogaríamos, y supe que sólo los más astutos, no yo ciertamente, iban a mantenerse a flote un poco más de tiempo.

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.

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. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them. . .

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. Is it raining? You look up. The sky is still deceptively sunny…seconds later another drop. Then, with the sun still perched in the sky, you are drenched in a shower of rain. This is how memories invade me, abruptly and unexpectedly…

We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.

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

Si. La vida toma el partido de la vida y culpa a les víctimas. Pero no fueron los MEJORES los que sobrevivie ron ni los que murieron. Fue al AZAR.

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 this way ever again.

With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.

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.

You are the gold and Love is within your heart.

I'm a perfectly equipped failure.

Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.

I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

I eat my heart out alone.

Ese día aprendi dos cosas: que el azar es caprichoso y que siempre hay que llevar el casco bien amarrado.

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

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

The more we die, the stronger we will become

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 traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

The revolution taught me not to be consoled by other people's miseries, not to feel thankful because so many others had suffered more. Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others.

Y todo me parece absurdo, arbitrario. Una se eleva y la otra cae en picado: pura casualidad, un capricho del azar. Todo se reduce a estar en el momento y el lugar adecuados, o no estarlo.

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.

The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

The reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do.

you cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be stubborn for something as well

When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?

الانسحاب الى احلامنا قد يكون خطراً

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

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?

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 democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, 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.

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

يشجعوننا على إظهار مشاعر حبنا للإمام بأقصى أشكال التعبير مغالاة، بينما يحرّمون علينا أن نظهر أي تعبير علني عن مشاعرنا الشخصية، وأعني الحب بشكل خاص

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 dream.

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.

Esa trama de tiempos que se aproximan, se bifurcan, se cortan o que secularmente se ignoran, abarca todas la posibilidades. No existimos en la mayoría de esos tiempos; en algunos existe usted y no yo; en otros, yo, no usted; en otros, los dos. En éste, que un favorable azar me depara, usted ha llegado a mi casa; en otro, usted, al atravesar el jardín, me ha encontrado muerto; en otro, yo digo estas mismas palabras, pero soy un error, un fantasma.

لا أريد أن يتذكرني أحد .. أريد أن أنسى .. فأنا لست واحدا من هذا القطيع

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

Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams.

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

At that time, she had worn the scarf as a testament to her faith. Her decision was a voluntary act. When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless.

كيف يمكن لإنسان أن يجادل ممثل الله على الأرض ؟

عجبا! كيف يمكن للحظة انفتاح يتيمة أن تتحول إلى حرية هائلة؟

I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends.

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 repressive.

I wish wish I could steal the intricacies of language. But give my kids a break—remember, most of them were fed on Steinbeck’s The Pearl.

Going away isn't going to help as much as you think. The memory stays with you, and the stain. It's not something you slough off once you leave.

I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams.

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 affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.

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 then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289)

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 true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." 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 traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

We do not read in order to turn great works of fiction into simplistic replicas of our own realities, we read for the pure, sensual, and unadulterated pleasure of reading. And if we do so, our reward is the discovery of the many hidden layers within these works that do not merely reflect reality but reveal a spectrum of truths, thus intrinsically going against the grain of totalitarian mindsets.

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 now metal instead of wood,the walls have been painted a garish pink ,the easy chair you loved so much is gone .Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set . This is your house,and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house , to its walls and doors and floors ; you are not seen .

Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.

Stories are not mere flights of fantasy or instruments of political power and control. They link us to our past, provide us with critical insight into the present and enable us to envision our lives not just as they are but as they should be or might become. Imaginative knowledge is not something you have today and discard tomorrow. It is a way of perceiving the world and relating to it.

Uno es una trayectoria que erra tratando de recoger las migajas de lo que un día fueron nuestras fuerzas, dejadas por allí de la manera más vil, quién sabe en dónde, o recomendadas (y nunca volver por ellas) a quien no merecía tenerlas. La música es la labor de un espíritu generoso que (con esfuerzo o no) reúne nuestras fuerzas primitivas y nos las ofrece, no para que las recobremos: para dejarnos constancia de que allí todavía andan, las pobrecitas, y que yo les hago falta. Yo soy la fragmentación. La música es cada uno de esos pedacitos que antes tuve en mí y los fui desprendiendo al azar. Yo estoy ante una cosa y pienso en miles. La música es la solución a lo que yo no enfrento, mientras pierdo el tiempo mirando la cosa: un libro (en los que ya no puedo avanzar dos páginas), el sesgo de una falda, de una reja. La música es también, recobrado, el tiempo que yo pierdo. Me lo señalan ellos, los músicos: cuánto tiempo y cómo y dónde. Yo, inocente y desnuda, soy simple y amable escucha. Ellos llevan las riendas del universo. A mí, con gentileza. Una canción que no envejece es la decisión universal de que mis errores han sido perdonados.

One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.

Allí fuera, en los caminos del mundo, había miles de millones líneas, de recorridos de vida. Miles de millones de direcciones. Calles enfiladas, desviadas por azar, a veces interrumpidas bruscamente. Pensó que dos enamorados no eran más que dos recorridos a merced del azar. Podían dibujar los trayectos más absurdos en el mapamundi, dirigirse a cualquier parte y no encontrarse jamás. O bien cruzarse también varias veces y no reconocerse. Podían tomar el mismo autobús todas las mañanas, sin saber nada el uno del otro. Así hasta el fin de sus días, sin relacionarse. Pero bastaba muy poco: un intercambio de frases, incluso casual, y las líneas se habrían mágicamente unido. Dos grises trazos de un solitario recorrido se habrían convertido en una sola calle compartida.

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 have seen women of vastly different backgrounds take on that same expression: a hazy, lazy, flirtatious look in their eyes. . . . This sort of seduction is elusive; it is sinewy and tactile. It twists, twirls, winds and unwinds. Hands curl and uncurl while the waist seems to coil and recoil. . . . It is openly seductive but not surrendering.

There are a lot of good things about dying. You are suddenly light and free and no longer afraid of death, sickness, judgement or religion; you don't have to grow up fated to replicate the lives of others. But for the most important advantage of death is knowing something when I want to know it. Kon fayakon. Piece of cake. If I want to be somewhere, I am, just like that.

Recorrí pasillos y galerías en espiral pobladas por cientos, miles de tomos que parecían saber más acerca de mí que yo de ellos. Al poco, me asaltó la idea de que tras la cubierta de cada uno de aquellos libros se abría un universo infinito por explorar y de que, más allá de aquellos muros, el mundo dejaba pasar la vida en tardes de fútbol y seriales de radio, satisfecho con ver hasta allí donde alcanza su ombligo y poco más. Quizá fue aquel pensamiento, quizá el azar o su pariente de gala, el destino, pero en aquel mismo instante supe que ya había elegido el libro que iba a adoptar. O quizá debiera decir el libro que me iba a adoptar a mí. Se asomaba tímidamente en el extremo de una estantería, encuadernado en piel de color vino y susurrando su título en letras doradas que ardían a la luz que destilaba la cúpula desde lo alto. Me acerqué hasta él y acaricié las palabras con la yema de los dedos, leyendo en silencio. La Sombra del Viento JULIÁN CARAX.

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 abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really.

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 "see" others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, or imposing our visions and desires on others.

Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, like an imaginary friend (or foe) or a secret concubine, constantly beckons, reminding us of our loss. What is memory but a ghost that lurks at the corners of the mind, interrupting our normal course of life, disrupting our sleep in order to remind us of some acute pain or pleasure, something silenced or ignored? We miss not only their presence, or how they felt about us, but ultimately how they allowed us to feel about ourselves or them. (prologue)

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 freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?

Las pasiones humanas son un misterio, a los niños le pasa lo mismo que a los mayores. Los que se dejan llevar por ellas no puede explicárselas, y los que no las han vivido, no pueden comprenderlas. Hay hombres que se juegan la vida para subir a una montaña. Nadie, ni siquiera ellos, puede explicar realmente por qué. Otros se arruinan para conquistar el corazón de una persona que no quiere saber nada de ellos. Otros se destruyen a sí mismos por no saber resistir los placeres de la mesa... o de la botella. Algunos pierden cuanto tienen para ganar en un juego de azar, o lo sacrifican todo a una idea fija que jamás podrá realizarse. Unos cuantos creen que solo serán felices en un lugar distinto, y recorren el mundo durante toda su vida. Y unos pocos no descansan hasta que consiguen ser poderosos. En resumen: hay tantas pasiones distintas como hombres distintos hay.

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives.

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination.

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark,” Baldwin said in an interview in 1961. “Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

Las pasiones humanas son un misterio, y a los niños les pasa lo mismo que a los mayores. Los que se dejan llevar por ellas no pueden explicárselas, y los que no las han vivido no pueden comprenderlas. Hay hombres que se juegan la vida para subir a una montaña. Nadie, ni siquiera ellos, pueden explicar realmente el por qué. Otros se arruinan para conquistar el corazón de una persona que no quiere saber nada de ellos. Otros se destruyen a sí mismos por no saber resistir los placeres de la mesa… o de la botella. Algunos pierden cuanto tienen para ganar en un juego de azar, o lo sacrifican todo a una idea fija que jamás podrá realizarse. Unos cuantos creen que sólo serán felices en algún lugar distinto, y recorren el mundo durante toda su vida. y unos pocos no descansan hasta que consiguen ser poderosos. En resumen: Hay tantas pasiones distintas como hombres distintos hay.

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling “the Republic of Imagination.” I think of it as Nabokov’s “somehow, somewhere” or Alice’s backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane.

It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure. What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then. Dreams, Mr Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself. When I left the class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. 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. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love "Madame Bovary" and cry for Emma, why we greedily read "Lolita" as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.

In his forward to the English edition of Invitation to a Beheading (1959), Nabokov reminds the reader that his novel does not offer 'tout pour tous.' Nothing of the kind. 'It is,' he claims, 'a violin in the void.' [...] There was something, both in his fiction and in his life, that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away. I think that is what drove me to create the class. My main link with the outside world had been the university, and now that I had severed that link, there on the brink of the void, I could invent the violin or be devoured by the void.

A vida inteira ele viveu perambulando, mandado embora de um lugar, assim que a "gente fina" comprava toda a maconha ou haxixe que quisesse, assim que houvesse perdido na roda da fortuna todas as moedas que queria. A vida inteira ele se ouviu sendo chamado de cigano sujo. A "gente fina" cria raízes; ele não tem nenhuma. Esse sujeito, Halleck, viu tendas de lona serem incendiadas por brincadeira, nos anos 30 e 40, e talvez houvesse bebês e velhos incendiados em algumas daquelas tendas. Ele viu suas filhas ou as filhas dos amigos serem atacadas, talvez violentadas, porque toda aquela "gente fina" sabe que ciganos trepam como coelhos e que um pouco mais não fará diferença — mas mesmo que faça, quem se importa? Ele talvez tenha visto seus filhos ou os filhos dos amigos serem surrados até quase a morte... e por quê? Porque os pais dos garotos que os surraram perderam algum dinheiro nos jogos de azar. É sempre a mesma coisa: você chega na cidade, a "gente fina" fica com o que quer e depois o manda embora. Às vezes, essa "gente fina" o condena a uma semana de trabalho na fazenda local de ervilhas ou um mês entre os trabalhadores da estrada local, como medida de ensinamento. E então, Halleck, para o cúmulo das coisas, vem o estalo final do chicote. O importante advogado de três queixos e bochechas de buldogue atropela e mata sua esposa na rua. Ela tem 70, 75 anos, é meio cega, talvez apenas se aventure no meio da rua depressa demais por querer voltar para sua gente antes de se mijar nas roupas — e ossos velhos quebram fácil, ossos velhos são como vidro, e você fica por ali, pensando que desta vez, apenas desta vez, haverá um pouco de justiça... um instante de justiça, como indenização por toda uma vida de miséria e...

The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokovs fascinating creations, possibly a word he invented. I said I associate Upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be a name of a dance- you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me". Manna suggested that the word upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in parentheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahashid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting" Upsilamba" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And for Nassrin it was a magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures.

American students, we are told, are falling behind in reading and math; on test after test, they score below most European students (at the level of Lithuania), and the solution, rather than seeking to engage their curiosity, has been testing and more testing— a dry and brittle method that produces lackluster results. And so resources are pulled from the “soft” fields that are not being tested. Music teachers are being fired or not replaced; art classes are quietly dropped from the curriculum; history is simplified and moralized, with little expectation that any facts will be learned or retained; and instead of reading short stories, poems and novels, students are invited to read train schedules and EPA reports whose jargon could put even the most committed environmentalist to sleep.