Empathy Lies At The Heart Of Gatsby,

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.

I Would Like To Say How Much I Resent People Who Say Of The Islamic Republic That This Is Our Culture - As If Women Like To Be Stoned To Death, Or As If They Like To Be Married At The Age Of Nine.

Look At Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolution And The Slogans That They Used: Anti-imperialism; Anti-colonialism; The Struggle Of The Have-nots Against The Haves; The State Monopoly Over Economy, Which Was Very Much Patterned After The Soviet Union. All Of These Things Did Not Come Out Of Islam. Islam Is Not That Developed.

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.

In The Past 30 Years, Officials Of The Iranian Regime And Its Apologists Have Labeled Criticism, Especially With Regard To Women's Rights, As Anti-islamic And Pro-western, Justifying Its Brutalities By Ascribing Them To Islam And Iran's Culture.