Azar Nafisi quotes - page 3

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)
I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic. View quote
Azar Nafisi
When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules. View quote
Azar Nafisi
I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture - as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine. View quote
Azar Nafisi
With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem. View quote
Azar Nafisi
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. View quote
Azar Nafisi
those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. View quote
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. View quote
Azar Nafisi
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. View quote
Azar Nafisi
A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue. View quote
Azar Nafisi
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)
I'm a perfectly equipped failure. View quote
Azar Nafisi
The more we die, the stronger we will become. View quote
Azar Nafisi
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. View quote
Azar Nafisi
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. View quote
Azar Nafisi
The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. View quote
Azar Nafisi
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. View quote
Azar Nafisi
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. View quote
Azar Nafisi
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. View quote
Azar Nafisi
I explained that 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 too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes. View quote
Azar Nafisi