Top 100 Azar Nafisi Quotes
#1. When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.
Azar Nafisi
#2. 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
#3. When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their democratic enterprise. Knowledge was not just a luxury; it was essential.
Azar Nafisi
#4. After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.
Azar Nafisi
#5. [T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.
Azar Nafisi
#6. 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
#7. 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.
Azar Nafisi
#8. You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you'll not only miss the people you love, but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you'll never be the same again
Azar Nafisi
#9. Whoever we were - and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not - we had become the figment of someone else's dreams.
Azar Nafisi
#10. The fact is I don't know what I want, and I don't know if I am doing the right thing. I've always been told what is right - and suddenly I don't know anymore. I know what I don't want, but I don't know what I want,' she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched.
Azar Nafisi
#11. 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
#12. It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were respected and understood.
Azar Nafisi
#13. Did you ever dream this could happen to us? He said, No I didn't, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right.
Azar Nafisi
#14. 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.
Azar Nafisi
#15. The world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.
Azar Nafisi
#16. 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.
Azar Nafisi
#17. Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?
Azar Nafisi
#18. I do not consider myself Western, but rather modern
Azar Nafisi
#19. Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs?
Well, that is the crux of the great novels xxx - the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.
Azar Nafisi
#20. America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
Azar Nafisi
#21. 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
#22. In the final analysis we are our own betrayers.
Azar Nafisi
#23. The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.
Azar Nafisi
#24. All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.
Azar Nafisi
#25. I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.
Azar Nafisi
#26. And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.
Azar Nafisi
#27. I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.
Azar Nafisi
#28. Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy - even in the books, there were few men for her.
Azar Nafisi
#29. A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
Azar Nafisi
#30. 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
#31. And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby
Azar Nafisi
#32. You cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be stubborn for something as well
Azar Nafisi
#33. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
Azar Nafisi
#34. This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences
Azar Nafisi
#35. It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.
Azar Nafisi
#36. The class's favorite
book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates
Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his
originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law.
Azar Nafisi
#37. 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
#38. Only Catherine has the capacity to change and mature, although here...our heroine pays a dear price for this change. And she does take a form of revenge on both her father and her suitor: she refuses to give in to them. In the end, she has her triumph.
Azar Nafisi
#39. The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.
Azar Nafisi
#40. She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that?
Azar Nafisi
#41. Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran.
Azar Nafisi
#42. Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.
Azar Nafisi
#43. These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards.
Azar Nafisi
#44. After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public - seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends - shifted to private homes. It was refreshing to go out once in a while, even to such a desultory event.
Azar Nafisi
#45. [V]alue your dreams but ... be wary of them also, ... look for integrity in unusual places.
Azar Nafisi
#46. You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.
Azar Nafisi
#47. I blame my generation for having neglected to teach our children that in life there are no safe places, that safety is an illusion. "Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark," Baldwin said in an interview in 1961.
Azar Nafisi
#48. Teaching is a funny business; you want to share these glimpses of something real and profound, but half the time students want only to know their next assignment and what they will need to study for the test.
Azar Nafisi
#49. So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness, but the right to its pursuit.
Azar Nafisi
#50. Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that it exists.
Azar Nafisi
#51. The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity.
Azar Nafisi
#52. Our
world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our
sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city
that sprawled below.
Azar Nafisi
#53. Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it as an instrument of control in the same way that in Mao's China people were wearing Mao jackets and women were not supposed to wear any makeup.
Azar Nafisi
#54. 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
#55. 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.
Azar Nafisi
#56. We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.
Azar Nafisi
#57. The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me.
Azar Nafisi
#58. 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.
Azar Nafisi
#59. 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.
Azar Nafisi
#60. The biggest crime in Nabokov's 'Lolita' is imposing your own dream upon someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian state does.
Azar Nafisi
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived
Azar Nafisi
#64. 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
#65. Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it.
Azar Nafisi
#66. People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.
Azar Nafisi
#67. You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ
Azar Nafisi
#68. We envy people like you, and we want to be you; we can't, so we destroy you.
Azar Nafisi
#69. He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment,
Azar Nafisi
#70. ...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.
Azar Nafisi
#71. I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams.
Azar Nafisi
#72. Well, that was in 1995 when I resigned from my last academic job.
Azar Nafisi
#74. At that time, she had worn the scarf as a testament to her faith. Her decision was a voluntary act. When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless.
Azar Nafisi
#75. 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
#76. My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.
Azar Nafisi
#77. It's frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.
Azar Nafisi
#78. Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force.
Azar Nafisi
#79. I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
Azar Nafisi
#80. 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
#81. Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.
Azar Nafisi
#82. Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank - you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else - we either plan it or dream it.
Azar Nafisi
#83. Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?
Azar Nafisi
#84. Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to challenge negative traditions, and create to new ones.
Azar Nafisi
#85. These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things.
Azar Nafisi
#86. 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.
Azar Nafisi
#87. Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone.
Azar Nafisi
#88. Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
Azar Nafisi
#89. Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.
Azar Nafisi
#90. 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
#91. Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them.
Azar Nafisi
#92. 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.
Azar Nafisi
#93. [A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.
Azar Nafisi
#94. Shouldn't he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress?
Azar Nafisi
#95. My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles.
Azar Nafisi
#96. We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
Azar Nafisi
#97. 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
#98. With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
Azar Nafisi
#99. The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.
Azar Nafisi
#100. Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
Azar Nafisi
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