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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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Azar Nafisi
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Feels
Ancient
Americans
Promise
Future
Dream
Tehran
Past
Obsess
Country
Nostalgia
Feel
Countries

More quotes by 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
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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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
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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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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.
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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When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?
Azar Nafisi
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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.
Azar Nafisi
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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.
Azar Nafisi
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I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.
Azar Nafisi
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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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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
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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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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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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.
Azar Nafisi