Azar Nafisi quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Azar Nafisi on Wise Famous Quotes.

Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.

It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine

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

Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect.

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

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.

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

[T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.

Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it.

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby

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

The more we die, the stronger we will become

My toe as a lethal weapon!

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

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

Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine will suddenly give way to showers and storms.

The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me.

I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences

Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived

She felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.

These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things.

This is the old part of Tehran, with small spice shops, dusty narrow alleys with dry streams winding into houses with tall protective walls.

Our patents' old age shocks us in the same manner that our children's growth to maturity does , but without the joy.

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

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

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

Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.

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

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.

Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them.

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

Art is as useful as bread.

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

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

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'm a perfectly equipped failure.

Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran.

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.

I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.

After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.

In the final analysis we are our own betrayers.

Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force.

It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the institution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony.

The world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.

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

In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.

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

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

All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.

I do not consider myself Western, but rather modern

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

When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.

Dreams,Mr.Nazari,are perfect ideals,complete in themselves.

I eat my heart out alone.

The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.

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

Is it possible to write a reverent novel," said Nassrin, "and to have it be good? ...

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.

When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.

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

Primo Levi once said, "I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind." Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.

[V]alue your dreams but ... be wary of them also, ... look for integrity in unusual places.

Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?

How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?

He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment,

It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.

readers were born free and ought to remain free.

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.

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.

Well, that was in 1995 when I resigned from my last academic job.

Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.

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

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

It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

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

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

But I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution.

How could God be so cruel as to create a Muslim woman with so much flesh and so little sex appeal?

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