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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
Life
Evil
Essential
Individual
Essentials
Part
Response
Also
Everyday
Doe
Becoming
Individualized
Soul
Becomes
Tehran
Way
Question
Resisting
Love
Imagination
Survive

More quotes by Azar Nafisi

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Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
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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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Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran, no matter how benign their intentions, present a condescending view not just of the religion but also of women living in Muslim majority countries, as if the desire for choice and happiness is the monopoly of women in the west.
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Art is as useful as bread.
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I'm a perfectly equipped failure.
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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.
Azar Nafisi
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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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Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.
Azar Nafisi
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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
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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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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
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When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.
Azar Nafisi
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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.
Azar Nafisi
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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
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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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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
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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.
Azar Nafisi
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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.
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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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