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.
Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
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.
None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.
Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.
Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
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.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.
She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.
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?
![[A] novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/azar-nafisi-6765.jpg)
[A] novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
Art is as useful as bread.
I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.
She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of scared relationship to god, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.
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.
I eat my heart out alone.
I'm a perfectly equipped failure.
I could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.
The more we die, the stronger we will become
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.
It's frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.
The reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do.
When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
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?
Poshlust, Nabokov explains, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more repressive.
You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ
Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe.
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you.
Going away isn't going to help as much as you think. The memory stays with you, and the stain. It's not something you slough off once you leave.
Incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.
THOSE WHO ARE CLOSE TO US, when they die, divide our world.
Our patents' old age shocks us in the same manner that our children's growth to maturity does , but without the joy.
Is it possible to write a reverent novel," said Nassrin, "and to have it be good?...
...the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.
My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles.
This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences
Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
You cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be stubborn for something as well
What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Teaching is a funny business; you want to share these glimpses of something real and profound, but half the time students want only to know their next assignment and what they will need to study for the test.
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes.
At that time, she had worn the scarf as a testament to her faith. Her decision was a voluntary act. When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless.
The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.
Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.
We envy people like you, and we want to be you; we can't, so we destroy you.
So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness, but the right to its pursuit.
All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.
Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.
..."readers were born free and ought to remain free.
How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?
Dreams,Mr.Nazari,are perfect ideals,complete in themselves.
Did you ever dream this could happen to us? He said, No I didn't, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right.
I wish wish I could steal the intricacies of language. But give my kids a break—remember, most of them were fed on Steinbeck’s The Pearl.
These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards.
She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves.
How could God be so cruel as to create a Muslim woman with so much flesh and so little sex appeal?
I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams.
Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine will suddenly give way to showers and storms.
...but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution.
Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.
Most people have a way of radiating their potential – not just what they are, but what they could become.
The world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.
Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves as a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of society.
It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.
Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect.
Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it.
In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.
Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived
