Azar Nafisi Quotes
Top 81 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
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.
Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.
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
Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.
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.
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 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.
After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.
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.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.