Azar Nafisi quotes - page 2

Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American author and professor of literature, best known for her memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran." Her works explore themes of literature, freedom, and the complexities of life under totalitarian regimes. She has inspired countless readers with her advocacy for intellectual freedom and women's rights. Here are 70 of her quotes:

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

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

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

Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.

Azar Nafisi

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.

Azar Nafisi

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

What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven.

Azar Nafisi

This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.

Azar Nafisi

Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.

Azar Nafisi

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

On the one hand, the ruling Islamic regime has succeeded in completely repressing Iranian women. Women are forbidden to go out in public unless they are covered by clothing that conceals everything but their hands and faces. At all government institutions, universities, and airports, there are separate entrances for women, where they are searched for lipstick and other weapons of mass destruction. ... Yet, while these measures are meant to render women invisible and powerless, they are paradoxically making women tremendously visible and powerful.

Azar Nafisi

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

Yes, the novel is about concrete living relationships, a man's love for a woman, a woman's betrayal of that love. But it is also about wealth, its great attraction as well as its destructive power, the carelessness that comes with it, and, yes, it is about the American dream, a dream of power and wealth, the beguiling light of Daisy's house and the port of entry to America. It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.

Azar Nafisi

It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness - a word that is central in Austen's novels but is seldom used in James's universe. What James's characters gain is self-respect.

Azar Nafisi

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.

Azar Nafisi

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

Azar Nafisi

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

The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

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

When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?

Azar Nafisi

I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.

Azar Nafisi

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