Best 127 quotes of Azar Nafisi on MyQuotes

Azar Nafisi

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    Azar Nafisi

    A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.

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    Azar Nafisi

    After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used by the West, especially America, to corrupt and incite Iranian youth, and finally closed down all the Humanities departments in Iran's universities.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    Art is as useful as bread.

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    Azar Nafisi

    Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.

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    Azar Nafisi

    Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to challenge negative traditions, and create to new ones.

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    Azar Nafisi

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

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    Azar Nafisi

    Every great work of art ... is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

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    Azar Nafisi

    For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.

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    Azar Nafisi

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

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    Azar Nafisi

    I believe in empathy. I believe in the kind of empathy that is created through imagination and through intimate, personal relationships. I am a writer and a teacher, so much of my time is spent interpreting stories and connecting to other individuals. It is the urge to know more about ourselves and others that creates empathy. Through imagination and our desire for rapport, we transcend our limitations, freshen our eyes, and are able to look at ourselves and the world through a new and alternative lens.

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    Azar Nafisi

    I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

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

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.

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    Azar Nafisi

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

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.

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    Azar Nafisi

    Only curiosity about the fate of others, the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, and the will to enter their world through the magic of imagination, creates this shock of recognition. Without this empathy there can be no genuine dialogue, and we as individuals and nations will remain isolated and alien, segregated and fragmented.

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    Azar Nafisi

    Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.

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    Azar Nafisi

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

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    Azar Nafisi

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

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    Azar Nafisi

    That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and formulas.

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    Azar Nafisi

    The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

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    Azar Nafisi

    The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.

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    Azar Nafisi

    The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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.

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    Azar Nafisi

    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?