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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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Azar Nafisi
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Right
Tradition
Every
Negative
Something
Ones
Challenges
Create
Culture
Traditions
Also
Ashamed
Change
Challenge
More quotes by Azar Nafisi
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
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
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
A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
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
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
I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture - as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine.
Azar Nafisi
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
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 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
When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?
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
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
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
The more we die, the stronger we will become
Azar Nafisi
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
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
The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.
Azar Nafisi
Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
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
