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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.

Azar Nafisi

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Azar Nafisi
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Also
Everyday
Doe
Becoming
Individualized
Soul
Becomes
Tehran
Way
Question
Resisting
Love
Imagination
Survive
Life
Evil
Essential
Individual
Essentials
Part
Response

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Art is as useful as bread.
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America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
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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.
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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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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.
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When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
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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?
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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.
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A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
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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.
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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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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.
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With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
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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
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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