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

Azar Nafisi

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Azar Nafisi
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Regimes
Thus
Present
Rights
History
Past
Iranian
Also
Regime
Women
Deprived

More quotes by Azar Nafisi

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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.
Azar Nafisi
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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.
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When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?
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The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. 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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Art is as useful as bread.
Azar Nafisi
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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.
Azar Nafisi
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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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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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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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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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Only curiosity about the fate of others, the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, and the will to enter their world through the magic of imagination, creates this shock of recognition. Without this empathy there can be no genuine dialogue, and we as individuals and nations will remain isolated and alien, segregated and fragmented.
Azar Nafisi
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Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
Azar Nafisi
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This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?
Azar Nafisi
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Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.
Azar Nafisi
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With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
Azar Nafisi
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America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
Azar Nafisi
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Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
Azar Nafisi
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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.
Azar Nafisi
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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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I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination.
Azar Nafisi