Top 100 Nafisi Quotes

#1. When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.

Azar Nafisi

Nafisi Quotes #24609
#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.

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Nafisi Quotes #36183
#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.

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Nafisi Quotes #81395
#4. After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.

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Nafisi Quotes #100197
#5. [T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.

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Nafisi Quotes #121900
#6. Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams.

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Nafisi Quotes #139106
#7. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #146336
#8. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

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Nafisi Quotes #151416
#9. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #155157
#10. There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.

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Nafisi Quotes #187791
#11. She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols. Where do your loyalties lie, Mr. Bahri, with Islam or the state?

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Nafisi Quotes #190117
#12. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #198119
#13. 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

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Nafisi Quotes #201523
#14. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #201858
#15. I'm a perfectly equipped failure.

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Nafisi Quotes #202246
#16. In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.

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Nafisi Quotes #223401
#17. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #231807
#18. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #245050
#19. 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

Nafisi Quotes #253046
#20. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #261136
#21. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #276084
#22. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #282496
#23. The world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.

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Nafisi Quotes #298195
#24. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #317256
#25. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #331084
#26. Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?

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Nafisi Quotes #349727
#27. I do not consider myself Western, but rather modern

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Nafisi Quotes #353928
#28. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #358606
#29. America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

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Nafisi Quotes #368216
#30. In the Damascus airport she had been humiliated by what she was assumed to be, and when she returned home, she felt angry because of what she could have been.

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Nafisi Quotes #371980
#31. She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves.

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Nafisi Quotes #388109
#32. 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?

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Nafisi Quotes #390766
#33. In the final analysis we are our own betrayers.

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Nafisi Quotes #395052
#34. Incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.

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Nafisi Quotes #400473
#35. The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.

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Nafisi Quotes #417336
#36. We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin's uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality.

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Nafisi Quotes #420883
#37. How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?

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Nafisi Quotes #421639
#38. All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.

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Nafisi Quotes #425288
#39. Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.

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Nafisi Quotes #443477
#40. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #444243
#41. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #444267
#42. This is the old part of Tehran, with small spice shops, dusty narrow alleys with dry streams winding into houses with tall protective walls.

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Nafisi Quotes #444524
#43. I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.

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Nafisi Quotes #450126
#44. He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else.

Azar Nafisi

Nafisi Quotes #452809
#45. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #472513
#46. A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.

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Nafisi Quotes #473389
#47. It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the institution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony.

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Nafisi Quotes #500408
#48. 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 ...

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Nafisi Quotes #503599
#49. In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.

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Nafisi Quotes #505780
#50. And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby

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Nafisi Quotes #534818
#51. You cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be stubborn for something as well

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Nafisi Quotes #547930
#52. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

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Nafisi Quotes #584851
#53. This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences

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Nafisi Quotes #604989
#54. It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.

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Nafisi Quotes #609287
#55. In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so provident or benign.

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Nafisi Quotes #626064
#56. Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive.

Azar Nafisi

Nafisi Quotes #640591
#57. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #649886
#58. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #655484
#59. There was something, both in fiction and in his life (Nabokov), that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away.
I could invent violin or be devoured by the void.

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Nafisi Quotes #668433
#60. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #675985
#61. The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.

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Nafisi Quotes #681866
#62. 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?

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Nafisi Quotes #702101
#63. Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

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Nafisi Quotes #703472
#64. Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.

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Nafisi Quotes #719881
#65. Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran.

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Nafisi Quotes #736033
#66. Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.

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Nafisi Quotes #744671
#67. My toe as a lethal weapon!

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Nafisi Quotes #750107
#68. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #751840
#69. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #768433
#70. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #794803
#71. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #795740
#72. [V]alue your dreams but ... be wary of them also, ... look for integrity in unusual places.

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Nafisi Quotes #798768
#73. You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.

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Nafisi Quotes #799581
#74. 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

Nafisi Quotes #801821
#75. 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

Nafisi Quotes #811817
#76. 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

Nafisi Quotes #819688
#77. You don't understand their mentality. They won't accept your resignation because they don't think you have the right to quit. They are the ones who decide how long you should stay and when you should be dispensed with. More than anything else, it was this arbitrariness that had become unbearable.

Azar Nafisi

Nafisi Quotes #836724
#78. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #840855
#79. It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine

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Nafisi Quotes #846584
#80. The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.

Azar Nafisi

Nafisi Quotes #847996
#81. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #849226
#82. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #853051
#83. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #919384
#84. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #933347
#85. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #936556
#86. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #951878
#87. The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me.

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Nafisi Quotes #962247
#88. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #970263
#89. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

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Nafisi Quotes #973046
#90. 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

Nafisi Quotes #973814
#91. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

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Nafisi Quotes #975571
#92. Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.

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Nafisi Quotes #977526
#93. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #1010618
#94. Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world - not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.

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Nafisi Quotes #1013937
#95. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #1042408
#96. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #1063979
#97. The more we die, the stronger we will become

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Nafisi Quotes #1066379
#98. 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.

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Nafisi Quotes #1089658
#99. Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect.

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Nafisi Quotes #1093371
#100. Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived

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Nafisi Quotes #1099626

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