Prisoner Of Tehran Quotes

تمنيت لو كان العالم مكاناً بسيطاً كل الناس فيه اما أخيار أو أشرار.

سوف تقدرينه عندما تكبرين. عندما تكونين بحاجة للبكاء دون أن يعلم أحد أنك تبكين، يمكنك تقطيع البصل.

الحزن أمر غريب! إنه يتخذ أشكالاً وألواناً متعددة. تساءلت دوماً هل تمكن أحد من تحديدها كلها وإعطائها أسماءً وهمية.

Now that I was lying safely in my bed, it had become much easier to be brave.

Each tombstone was like the cover of a book that had been sealed forever.

إن الصمت و الظلام يتشابهان إلى حد بعيد، فالظلام غياب للضوء، و الصمت غياب للأصوات.

Moving to America felt as splitting and eternal as death.

You have to know that death is only a step we have to take to reach the other world and live, only in a different way.

Such an act [testifying for an accused prison guard of the Shah's regime] can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality.... Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. 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.... If we have learned this one lesson from Dr. A our society would have been in a much better shape today.

تمنيت ان اعفو عنه ولا كن العفو لا ياتي دفعه واحده كهديه مغلفه بشريط احمرانما ياتي تدريجيا بالاضافه الي ذلك لن يمحو العفو اثار الالم اللذي سببه لي سوف يلازمني هذا الالم ما حيت لاكن هذا العفو سيساعدني ان اتسامي عن الماضي اواجه كل ما حذث كان عليه ان اصرفه عن ذهني كلي احرر نفسي منه " مارينا

Nos da miedo preguntar porque nos da miedo saber.

During our stay in Newport Beach, the Iranian Revolution took place and a group of Americans were taken hostage in the American embassy in Tehran. Overnight, Iranians living in America became, to say the least, very unpopular. For some reason, many Americans began to think that all Iranians, despite outward appearances to the contrary, could at any given moment get angry and take prisoners.

Then there is the butterfly-or is it a moth? Humbert's inability to differentiate between the two,his indifference, implies a moral carelessness. This blind indifference echoes his callous attitude towards Lolita's nightly sobs. Those who tell us Lolita is a little vixen who deserved what she got should remember her nightly sobs in the arms of her rapist and jailer, because you see, as Humbert reminds us with a mixture of relish and pathos, "she had absolutely nowhere else to go." This came to mind when we were discussing in our class Humbert's confiscation of Lolita's life. The first thing that struck us in reading Lolita-in fact it was on the very first page-was how Lolita was given to us as Humbert's creature. We only see her in passing glimpses. "What I had madly possessed," he informs us, "was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita-perhaps, more real than Lolita . . . having no will, no consciousness-indeed no real life of her own." Humbert pins Lolita by first naming her, a name that becomes the echo of his desires. To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own, turning Lolita into a reincarnation of his lost, unfulfilled young love. Humbert's solipsization of Lolita. Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert's attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history. Lolita has a tragic past, with a dead father and a dead two-year-old brother. And now also a dead mother. Like my students, Lolita's past comes to her not so much as a loss but as a lack, and like my students, she becomes a figment in someone else's dream. When I think of Lolita, I think of that half-alive butterfly pinned to the wall. The butterfly is not an obvious symbol, but it does suggest that Humbert fixes Lolita in the same manner that the butterfly is fixed; he wants her, a living breathing human being, to become stationary, to give up her life for the still life he offers her in return. Lolita's image is forever associated in the minds of her readers with that of her jailer. Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life through her prison bars. This is how I read Lolita. Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.

As Christopher Davidson sets forth in his recent book, Shadow Wars, the United States and Britain continued to aid and abet Iran, even more intensely after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in the physical extermination of Iran’s left-wing. As Davidson explains, in 1983 “the CIA and MI6 jointly began to pass on information to the Tehran regime about Iranian communists and other leftists. Going far further than the Shah ever had, Khomeini made over a thousand arrests and executed several leaders of the Tudeh Party. As James Bill describes, this was regarded in the West as successfully ‘completing the dismantling of the Iranian left,’ even though the CIA and MI6 had long been aware of the Islamic Republic’s propensity for executing political prisoners without trial.”13

The techniques used by the SAVAK, many borrowed from the Nazis and then passed along to the SAVAK by the CIA,10 were uniquely grisly and terrible. The SAVAK operated much like the Gestapo, entering a person’s home at night, hauling the person away and many times disappearing that person forever. A quite ominous State Department cable (from Wikileaks), dated March 7, 1975, describes such an event: NYMAN INFORMS THAT WHEN ARRESTED MAJID WAS AT HIS FAMILY HOME IN TEHRAN (118 AVENUE GHAANI—FORMERLY TIR). HIS FATHER HADI GHAVAM INFORMED DAUGHTER (MRS. NYMAN) THAT FIVE SAVAK MEN ENTERED HOME AT 10 P.M. AND TOOK AWAY MAJID AND FOUR OF HIS BOOKS. HE HAS NOT BEEN HEARD FROM SINCE. FATHER ALSO SAID FAIRLY LARGE NUMBER OF KARAJ STUDENTS ARRESTED AROUND SAME TIME.11 This is all the cable says. Most likely, Majid was taken to a prison and tortured, and very well could have died under torture as so many Iranians did at the hands of the SAVAK.

Child, we can't see the face of God with these eyes, but with our souls. You have to know that death is only a step we have to take to reach the other world and live, only in a different way.

Lolita’s image is forever associated in the minds of her readers with that of her jailer. Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life through her prison bars.

What beautiful prisons,’ the Colonel finally said, ‘what beautiful prisons we make for ourselves in these ruins.

كيف يمكن لكل هذا الجمال أن يوجد في هذا العالم القاسي ؟

What beautiful prisons,’ the Colonel finally said, ‘what beautiful prisons we make for ourselves in these ruins.’ Colonel Vaziri, in A Time to Love in Tehran by C.G. Fewston

On Sept. 26, 2012, an American pastor named Saeed Abedini who was visiting family and fellow Christians in Tehran was dragged out of the private home he was staying in and hauled away to jail by Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Friday marked the second anniversary of his imprisonment, and for the last two years he has been beaten, abused and subjected to solitary confinement for weeks on end in Iran’s most notoriously dangerous prisons for the crime of professing his Christian faith. Pastor

The Americans, exhausted by their losses, could get Iran to do some of the fighting against ISIS in Iraq. Tehran knew that agreeing to the nuclear deal would open the door to discreet co-operation with the Americans; President Obama desperately wanted a foreign-policy success – and the nuclear deal could provide it. So Iran agreed to give up 98 per cent of its highly enriched uranium. It was an example of how a marriage of convenience to solve a short-term problem can override deeper differences – temporarily.

There was a very brief period, between the time the Shah left on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 1, when one of the nationalist leaders, Dr. Shahpour Bakhtiar, had become the prime minister. Bakhtiar was perhaps the most democratic-minded and farsighted of the opposition leaders of that time, who, rather than rallying to his side, had fought against him and joined up with Khomeini. He had immediately disbanded Iran’s secret police and set the political prisoners free. In rejecting Bakhtiar and helping to replace the Pahlavi dynasty with a far more reactionary and despotic regime, both the Iranian people and the intellectual elites had shown at best a serious error in judgment. I remember at the time that Bijan’s was one lone voice in support of Bakhtiar, while all others, including mine, were only demanding destruction of the old, without much thought to the consequences.

The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy, and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics. As a result of this diversity, Iran has traditionally centralised power and used force and a fearsome intelligence network to maintain internal stability. Tehran knows that no one is about to invade Iran, but also that hostile powers can use its minorities to try and stir dissent and thus endanger its Islamic revolution.

Because the Arab states have not experienced a similar opening-up and have suffered from colonialism, they were not ready to turn the Arab uprisings into a real Arab Spring. Instead they soured into perpetual rioting and civil war. The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the ‘Green Revolution’, describing the young students of north Tehran as the ‘Youth of Iran’, thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.

But love had its way of doing things; it was like spring crawling into the skin of the earth at the end of winter. Each day the temperature rose just a little, tree branches swelled with new buds, the sun remained in the sky moments longer than the previous day, and before you knew it, the world was filled with warmth and color.

When I entered the kitchen, Grandma was chopping onions, tears rolling down her face. My eyes started to burn. "I hate raw onions," I said. "You'll appreciate them once you get older. Then, when you need torch and you don't want anyone to know you're crying, you can just chop onions.

The Iranian presence in neighbouring Syria has given Tehran a ‘land bridge’ across the Middle East, stretching from its capital to Beirut. It has used this bridge to increase its arms shipments to the huge Hezbollah Shia militia. Analysts suggest Hez-bollah now has an arsenal of up to 150,000 missiles, some of them guided, others long range. If and when Hezbollah in Lebanon uses its larger and longer-range rockets to reach deep into Israel on a significant scale, the response will be massive.

I closed my eyes and wondered if heaven had a Lost and Found. I had left many things behind.