Azar Nafisi Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“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

#Love #Change #People
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Imagination #Littles #Restless
“You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Issues #Self #Evil
“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

#Heart #Character #Destiny
“Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Atrocities #Silent #Innocent
“I eat my heart out alone.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Heart #My Heart
“You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Order #Imagination #Needs
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Home #Imagination #Expectations
“We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Imagination #Political #Feelings
“It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Taken #Possibility #Away From You
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Book #Order #Sanctuary
“The more we die, the stronger we will become”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Stronger
“Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Government #Iran #People
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Fate #Shoes #Imagination
“We in ancient countries have our past- we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Dream #Country #Past
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Reading #Reality #Discovery
“I'm a perfectly equipped failure.”
-- 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…”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Memories #Rain #Light
“Art is as useful as bread.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Art #Bread #Art Is
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Attitude #Passion #Land
“Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran, no matter how benign their intentions, present a condescending view not just of the religion but also of women living in Muslim majority countries, as if the desire for choice and happiness is the monopoly of women in the west.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Country #Views #Iran
“The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geographically and culturally determined, but universal.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Past #Rights #Iran
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Dream #Reality #Suffering
“Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Country #Born #Exile
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Struggle #Islam #Unions
“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.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Passion #Past #Order
“Every great work of art ... is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Art #Betrayal #Infidelity
“What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Reality #Fiction #Epiphany
“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

#Believe #People #Mind
“I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.”
-- Azar Nafisi

#Memories #Rain #Path

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