Azar Nafisi Quotes

These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...what James's characters gain is self-respect.
Azar Nafisi
Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.
Azar Nafisi
A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. 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
One of the most wonderful things about Pride and Prejudice is the variety of voices it embodies. There are so many different forms of dialogue: between several people, between two people, internal dialogue and dialogue through letters. All tensions are created and resolved through dialogue. Austen's ability to create such multivocality, such diverse voices and intonations in relation and in confrontation within a cohesive structure, is one of the best examples of the democratic aspect of the novel. In Austen's novels, there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist. There is also space - not just space but a necessity - for self-reflection and self-criticism. Such reflection is the cause of change. We needed no message, no outright call for plurality, to prove our point. All we needed was to reach and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic imperative. There was where Austen's danger lay.
Azar Nafisi
The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity.
Azar Nafisi
When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their democratic enterprise. Knowledge was not just a luxury; it was essential.
Azar Nafisi
It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools— all those places where I felt at home have joined the list of endangered species. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and my own hometown paper, The Washington Post, have all closed their weekend book review sections, leaving books orphaned and stranded, poor cousins to television and the movies. In a sign of the times, the Bloomberg News website recently transferred its book coverage to the Luxury section, alongside yachts, sports clubs and wine, as if to signal that books are an idle indulgence of the super-rich. But if there is one thing that should not be denied to anyone rich or poor it is the opportunity to dream.
Azar Nafisi
Most serious confrontations in life are not political, they are existential. One can agree with someone's political stance but disagree in a fundamental way with how they came to that position. It is a question of attitude, of moral configuration. My husband and I had plenty of grievances, but it all boiled down to a fundamental difference in the way we perceived life, the context within which we defined ourselves and our world. For that, there was no reconciliation or resolution, there was only separation or surrender.
Azar Nafisi
There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I have seen women of vastly different backgrounds take on that same expression: a hazy, lazy, flirtatious look in their eyes. . . . This sort of seduction is elusive; it is sinewy and tactile. It twists, twirls, winds and unwinds. Hands curl and uncurl while the waist seems to coil and recoil. . . . It is openly seductive but not surrendering.
Azar Nafisi
[A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.
Azar Nafisi
It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.
Azar Nafisi
Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, like an imaginary friend (or foe) or a secret concubine, constantly beckons, reminding us of our loss. What is memory but a ghost that lurks at the corners of the mind, interrupting our normal course of life, disrupting our sleep in order to remind us of some acute pain or pleasure, something silenced or ignored? We miss not only their presence, or how they felt about us, but ultimately how they allowed us to feel about ourselves or them. (prologue)
Azar Nafisi
[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.
Azar Nafisi
. . . none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with every new person, as if I am starting anew. These things are instinctive. What you need to learn is to lay aside your inhibitions, to go back to your childhood when you played marbles or whatever with boys and never thought anything of it.
Azar Nafisi
Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?
Azar Nafisi
I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.
Azar Nafisi
All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.
Azar Nafisi
But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling “the Republic of Imagination.” I think of it as Nabokov’s “somehow, somewhere” or Alice’s backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane.
Azar Nafisi
Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. “A native of America who cannot read or write,” said John Adams, “is as rare an appearance . . . as a Comet or an Earthquake.
Azar Nafisi
Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody’s in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson’s and Chapters.
Azar Nafisi
The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.
Azar Nafisi
A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one interpretation of the faith, and to accept the new political role of the clergy. Father felt that this spelled the end of Islam in our country, and he did have a point. 'No foreign power,' he said, 'could destroy Islam the way these people have.
Azar Nafisi
He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else.
Azar Nafisi
There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.
Azar Nafisi
She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
Azar Nafisi
There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives.
Azar Nafisi
She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
Azar Nafisi
I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends.
Azar Nafisi
It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were respected and understood.
Azar Nafisi
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.
Azar Nafisi
My toe as a lethal weapon!
Azar Nafisi
What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible.
Azar Nafisi
We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the rule of Islam? What memories were we creating for our children? This constant assault, this persistent lack of kindness, was what frightened me most.
Azar Nafisi
Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone.
Azar Nafisi
correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and their employees but also in the high cost of education, the incredible divide between private and public schools that makes all of the fine speeches by our policy makers— most of whom send their children to private schools anyway, just as they enjoy the benefits and perks of their jobs as servants of the people— all the more insidious and insincere.
Azar Nafisi
The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.
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
Don't let strangers touch you." And yet it is seldom strangers, I learned long before I was a teenager, who do you harm. It is always the ones closest to us: the suave chauffeur, the skilled photographer, the kind music teacher, the good friend's sober and dignified husband, the pious man of God. They are the ones your parents trust, whom they don't want to believe anything against.
Azar Nafisi
Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance.
Azar Nafisi
Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. 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
The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
Azar Nafisi
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
Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.
Azar Nafisi
But it was women like Rudabeh who planted in my mind the idea of a different kind of woman whose courage is private and personal. Without making any grand claims, without aiming to save humanity or defeat the forces of Satan, these women were engaged in a quiet rebellion, courageous not because it would get them accolades, but because they could not be otherwise. If they were limited and vulnerable, it was an audacious vulnerability, transcending the misogyny of their creator and his times.
Azar Nafisi
Both Yassi and I know that we have been losing our faith. We have been questioning it with every move. During the Shah's time, it was different. I felt I was in the minority and I had to guard my faith against all odds. Now that my religion is in power, I feel more helpless than ever before, and more alienated.' She wrote about how ever since she could remember, she had been told that life in the land of infidels was pure hell. She had been promised that all would be different under a just Islamic rule. Islamic rule! It was a pageant of hypocrisy and shame.
Azar Nafisi
All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.
Azar Nafisi
I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
Azar Nafisi
And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.
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. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. The affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabiness of the subject matter. This is why we love "Madame Bovary" and cry for Emma, why we greedily read "Lolita" as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.
Azar Nafisi
We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution...For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped at through extreme anguish and expressed through art.
Azar Nafisi
You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...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
Only Catherine has the capacity to change and mature, although here...our heroine pays a dear price for this change. And she does take a form of revenge on both her father and her suitor: she refuses to give in to them. In the end, she has her triumph.
Azar Nafisi
Look at these magnificent women, I thought, created in such misogynistic and hierarchical societies, yet they are the subversive centers around which the plot is shaped. Everything is supposed to revolve around the male hero. But it is the active presence of these women that changes events and diverts the man's life from its traditional course, that shocks him into changing his very mode of existence. In the classical Iranian narrative, active women dominate the scene; they make things happen.
Azar Nafisi
Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting.
Azar Nafisi
I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
Azar Nafisi
...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.
Azar Nafisi
I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289)
Azar Nafisi
Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that it exists.
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
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