Azar Quotes & Sayings

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. — Azar Nafisi

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

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. — Azar Nafisi

Art is as useful as bread. — Azar Nafisi

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

Happiness can never be captured and is only elusive when it is chased after — Judy Azar LeBlanc

The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe. — 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

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

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

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

You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual? — 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 believe in empathy. I believe in the kind of empathy that is created through imagination and through intimate, personal relationships. I am a writer and a teacher, so much of my time is spent interpreting stories and connecting to other individuals. It is the urge to know more about ourselves and others that creates empathy. Through imagination and our desire for rapport, we transcend our limitations, freshen our eyes, and are able to look at ourselves and the world through a new and alternative lens. — 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

Our patents' old age shocks us in the same manner that our children's growth to maturity does , but without the joy. — Azar Nafisi

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

The most important result of the encounter [in the preceding anecdote] is the scholar's startling discovery of the roundness of the earth ... Instinctively realizing the connection between the foreigner's presence, the roundness of the earth, and future changes and upheavals, he finally announces, Yes, the earth is round, the women will start to think, and as soon as they begin to think, they will become shameless. — Azar Nafisi

But it was women like Rudabeh who planted in my mind the idea of a different kind of woman whose courage is private and personal. Without making any grand claims, without aiming to save humanity or defeat the forces of Satan, these women were engaged in a quiet rebellion, courageous not because it would get them accolades, but because they could not be otherwise. If they were limited and vulnerable, it was an audacious vulnerability, transcending the misogyny of their creator and his times. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran. — Azar Nafisi

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. — Azar Nafisi

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

We envy people like you, and we want to be you; we can't, so we destroy you. — Azar Nafisi

I eat my heart out alone. — Azar Nafisi

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination. — Azar Nafisi

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

Do not let one hand say to the other, 'Stop, for I have already given. — Judy Azar LeBlanc

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

After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used by the West, especially America, to corrupt and incite Iranian youth, and finally closed down all the Humanities departments in Iran's universities. — Azar Nafisi

[Olga's dreams of happiness:] Get married, always live in the countryside winter and summer, see only good people, no one official. — Helen Azar

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

Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as 'bugs' or 'viruses' in, or 'mis-activations' of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance. — Azar Gat

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be paralyzed in the face of fear is only temporary; to never go beyond is crippling for life. — Judy Azar LeBlanc

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

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

I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires, of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have existed, felt, desired, hated, feared? — Azar Nafisi

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home. 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. — 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

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

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

Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested. — Azar Nafisi

Is it possible to write a reverent novel," said Nassrin, "and to have it be good? ... — Azar Nafisi

You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ — Azar Nafisi

One of the most wonderful things about Pride and Prejudice is the variety of voices it embodies. There are so many different forms of dialogue: between several people, between two people, internal dialogue and dialogue through letters. All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue. Austen's ability to create such multivocality, such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one of the best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel. In Austen's novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space - not just space but a necessity - for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change. We needed no message, no outright call for plurality, to prove our point. All we needed was to reach and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. There was where Austen's danger lay. — Azar Nafisi

Razieh had an amazing capacity for beauty. She said, You know, all my life I have lived in
poverty. I had to steal books and sneak into movie houses-but, God, I loved those books! I don't think any rich kid has ever cherished Rebecca or Gone with the Wind the way I did when I borrowed the translations from houses where my mother worked. — Azar Nafisi

The sole purpose of universal justice is to keep man's character in balance — Judy Azar LeBlanc

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

Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived — Azar Nafisi

More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies. I am twenty-seven. I don't know what it means to love. I don't want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is.You'd call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess. — 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

We can't all leave this country, Bijan had told me-this is our home. The world is a large place, my magician had said when I went to him with my woes. You can write and teach wherever you are. You will be read more and heard better, in fact, once you are over there. To go or not to go? In the long run, it's all very personal, my magician reasoned. I always admired your former colleague's honesty, he said. Which former colleague? Dr. A, the one who said his only reason for leaving was because he liked to drink beer freely. I am getting sick of people who cloak their personal flaws and desires in the guise of patriotic fervor. They stay because they have no means of living anywhere else, because if they leave, they won't be the big shots they are over here; but they talk about sacrifice for the homeland. And then those who do leave claim they've gone in order to criticize and expose the regime. Why all these justifications? — Azar Nafisi

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

Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289) — Azar Nafisi

Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer. — 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 ... — 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

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? — Azar Nafisi

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

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

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

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

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

Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer.
The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red. I feel too greedy for colors to see them in carefully chosen words of poetry. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president or representative, your children's future, your way and view of life. — Azar Nafisi

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

I'm a perfectly equipped failure. — Azar Nafisi

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

She explained why all the normal acts of life had become small acts of rebellion and political insubordination to her and to other young people like her. All her life she was shielded. She was never let out of sight; she never had a private corner in which to think, to feel, to dream, to write. She was not allowed to meet any young men on her own. Her family not only instructed her on how to behave around men - they seemed to think they could tell her how she should feel about them as well. What seems natural to someone like you, she said, is so strange and unfamiliar to me. — 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

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...For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped at through extreme anguish and expressed through art. — Azar Nafisi

Those whose eyes are open cannot see for they are blinded by the lust of all that is around them, and it is only when your eyes are closed that you may see that which is not visible — Judy Azar LeBlanc

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

These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen's novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose. — 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