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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

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Azar Nafisi
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: December 1
Faculty Member
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Public Figure
Writer
Teheran
Culture
Iran
Justifying
Past
Anti
Labeled
Women
Islam
Iranian
Years
Western
Brutality
Criticism
Regime
Regard
Regimes
Brutalities
Especially
Officials
Ascribing
Rights
Islamic
Apologists

More quotes by Azar Nafisi

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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
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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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It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
Azar Nafisi
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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.
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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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.
Azar Nafisi
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America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.
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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Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
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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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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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