Azar Nafisi > Quotes

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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

“It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.”
― 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, Things I've Been Silent About

“I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some cite its subject matter, the American Dream, to justify this distinction. 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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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?”
― 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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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

“We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“الانسحاب الى احلامنا قد يكون خطراً”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“I'm a perfectly equipped failure.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?”
― Azar Nafisi

“The revolution taught me not to be consoled by other people's miseries, not to feel thankful because so many others had suffered more. Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others. ”
― Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About

“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, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Poshlust, Nabokov explains, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“I eat my heart out alone.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi

“I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289)”
― Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About

“I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you.”
― Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About

“One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster…I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen…”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“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.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“يشجعوننا على إظهار مشاعر حبنا للإمام بأقصى أشكال التعبير مغالاة، بينما يحرّمون علينا أن نظهر أي تعبير علني عن مشاعرنا الشخصية، وأعني الحب بشكل خاص”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“The more we die, the stronger we will become”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Art is as useful as bread.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies. I am twenty-seven. I don't know what it means to love. I don't want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is.You'd call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess.”
― Azar Nafisi

“It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

“She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran