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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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Azar Nafisi
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Self
Justification
Lower
Esteem
Lies
Lying
Fear
Justifications
Come
Tehran
Matter
Convincing

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I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.
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