Azar Nafisi Quotes & Sayings

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby — Azar Nafisi

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences — Azar Nafisi

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

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

These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy. — Azar Nafisi

It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing. The realm of imagination is a bridge between them, constantly refashioning one in terms of the other. Plato's philosopher-king knew this and so did the blind censor, so it was perhaps not surprising that the Islamic Republic's first task had been to blur the lines and boundaries between the personal and the political, thereby destroying both. — Azar Nafisi

The more we die, the stronger we will become — Azar Nafisi

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in. — Azar Nafisi

A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue. — Azar Nafisi

What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible. — Azar Nafisi

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives. — Azar Nafisi

We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent
namely ideology. This was a country where all gestures, even the most private, were interpreted in political terms. The colors of my head scarf or my father's tie were symbols of Western decadence and imperialist tendencies. Not wearing a beard, shaking hands with members of the opposite sex, clapping or whistling in public meetings, were likewise considered Western and therefore decadent, part of the plot by imperialists to bring down our culture. — Azar Nafisi

I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends. — Azar Nafisi

Stories are not mere flights of fantasy or instruments of political power and control. They link us to our past, provide us with critical insight into the present and enable us to envision our lives not just as they are but as they should be or might become. Imaginative knowledge is not something you have today and discard tomorrow. It is a way of perceiving the world and relating to it. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

How could God be so cruel as to create a Muslim woman with so much flesh and so little sex appeal? — Azar Nafisi

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

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

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

Fiction is an antidote, a reminder of the power of individual choice. Every novel has at its core a choice by at least one of its protagonists, reminding the reader that she can choose to be her own person, to go against what her parents or society or the state tell her to do and follow the faint but essential beat of her own heart. — Azar Nafisi

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

Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

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

Looking back on that time it seems to me that such rapture over Tarkovsky by an audience most of whom would not have known how to spell his name, and who would under normal circumstances have ignored or even disliked his work, arose from our intense sensory deprivation. We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution. — Azar Nafisi

My toe as a lethal weapon! — Azar Nafisi

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

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

She felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, "Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves." I always associate Khomeini's death with Negar's simple pronouncement - for she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him. — Azar Nafisi

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

A novel is not an allegory ... it is a 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. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed. — 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

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

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

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. — Azar Nafisi

One can believe James's claim to an "imagination of disaster"; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such 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. — Azar Nafisi

With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem. — Azar Nafisi

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

I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose? — Azar Nafisi

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

There is seldom a physical description of a character or scene in Pride and Prejudice and yet we feel that we have seen each of these characters and their intimate worlds; we feel we know them, and sense their surroundings. We can see Elizabeth's reaction to Darcy's denunciation of her beauty, Mrs. Bennet chattering at the dinner table or Elizabeth and Darcy walking in and out of the shadows of the Pemberley estate. The amazing thing is that all of this is created mainly through tone - different tones of voice, words that become haughty and naughty, soft, harsh, coaxing, insinuating, insensible, vain.
The sense of touch that is missing from Austen's novels is replaced by a tension, an erotic texture of sounds and silences. She manages to create a feeling of longing by setting characters who want each other at odds. — Azar Nafisi

There, in jail, we dreamed of just being outside, free, but when I came out, I discovered that I missed the solidarity we had in jail, the sense of purpose, the way we tried to share memories and food. She said, More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies. — Azar Nafisi

Dreams,Mr.Nazari,are perfect ideals,complete in themselves. — Azar Nafisi

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. — Azar Nafisi

The world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors. — Azar Nafisi

[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

Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer's skill. — Azar Nafisi

Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me -- Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to "see" others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, or imposing our visions and desires on others. — Azar Nafisi

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

There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins - I'm sorry, I feel your pain? — Azar Nafisi

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

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. — Azar Nafisi

Incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy. — Azar Nafisi

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

I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me. — Azar Nafisi

Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting. — Azar Nafisi

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. — 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. — Azar Nafisi

Well, that was in 1995 when I resigned from my last academic job. — Azar Nafisi

I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain. — Azar Nafisi

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching. — Azar Nafisi

In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. — Azar Nafisi

readers were born free and ought to remain free. — Azar Nafisi

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

These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry. — Azar Nafisi

Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity? — Azar Nafisi

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

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling "the Republic of Imagination." I think of it as Nabokov's "somehow, somewhere" or Alice's backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane. — Azar Nafisi

You cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be stubborn for something as well — Azar Nafisi

Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into "us" and "them. — Azar Nafisi

It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one. — Azar Nafisi

It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine — Azar Nafisi

Such an act [testifying for an accused prison guard of the Shah's regime] can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality ... Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. 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 ... If we have learned this one lesson from Dr. A our society would have been in a much better shape today. — Azar Nafisi

It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the institution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony. — Azar Nafisi

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

In his forward to the English edition of Invitation to a Beheading (1959), Nabokov reminds the reader that his novel does not offer 'tout pour tous.' Nothing of the kind. 'It is,' he claims, 'a violin in the void.'

[...]

There was something, both in his fiction and in his life, that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away. I think that is what drove me to create the class. My main link with the outside world had been the university, and now that I had severed that link, there on the brink of the void, I could invent the violin or be devoured by the void. — Azar Nafisi

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

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

I wish wish I could steal the intricacies of language. But give my kids a break - remember, most of them were fed on Steinbeck's The Pearl. — Azar Nafisi

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson's and Chapters. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

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

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

That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

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