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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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Azar Nafisi
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Like
Pain
Blind
Means
Sin
Gatsby
Others
Lies
Tehran
Problem
Novel
Denying
Many
Problems
Pains
Mean
Seeing
Novels
Great
Existence
Empathy
Heart
Lying
Biggest

More quotes by Azar Nafisi

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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.
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
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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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?
Azar Nafisi
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For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.
Azar Nafisi
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The more we die, the stronger we will become
Azar Nafisi
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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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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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It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
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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Art is as useful as bread.
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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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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Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
Azar Nafisi