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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.
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
Absolutes
Novel
Called
Moral
Stupor
Word
Tehran
Sense
Confront
Makes
Shakes
Believe
Usual
More quotes by Azar Nafisi
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
I'm a perfectly equipped failure.
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
Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.
Azar Nafisi
When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?
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
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
Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
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
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
Azar Nafisi
America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
Azar Nafisi
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
Azar Nafisi
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.
Azar Nafisi
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.
Azar Nafisi
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?
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
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
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.
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
Art is as useful as bread.
Azar Nafisi