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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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Azar Nafisi
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Undermine
Paying
Poetry
Talk
Attention
America
Reductionism
Soul
Polarization
People
Superficiality

More quotes by 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?
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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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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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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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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.
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Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
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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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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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Art is as useful as bread.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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The more we die, the stronger we will become
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With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
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