Azar Nafisi Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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

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.

Azar Nafisi
It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness — a word that is central in Austen's novels but is seldom used in James's universe. What James's characters gain is self-respect.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Azar Nafisi
Yes, the novel is about concrete living relationships, a man's love for a woman, a woman's betrayal of that love. But it is also about wealth, its great attraction as well as its destructive power, the carelessness that comes with it, and, yes, it is about the American dream, a dream of power and wealth, the beguiling light of Daisy's house and the port of entry to America. It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.

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

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

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.

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

Azar Nafisi
As I trace the route to his apartment, the twists and turns, and pass once more the old tree opposite his house, I am struck by a sudden thought: 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.

Azar Nafisi
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.

Azar Nafisi
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.

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.

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

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

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.

Azar Nafisi
Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.

Azar Nafisi