Azar Nafisi Quotes

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

Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy - even in the books, there were few men for her. ~ Azar Nafisi

Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams. ~ Azar Nafisi

These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen's novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose. ~ Azar Nafisi

I eat my heart out alone. ~ Azar Nafisi

When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream? ~ Azar Nafisi

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

When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned. ~ Azar Nafisi

In his forward to the English edition of Invitation to a Beheading (1959), Nabokov reminds the reader that his novel does not offer 'tout pour tous.' Nothing of the kind. 'It is,' he claims, 'a violin in the void.'

[...]

There was something, both in his fiction and in his life, that we instinctively related to and grasped, the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away. I think that is what drove me to create the class. My main link with the outside world had been the university, and now that I had severed that link, there on the brink of the void, I could invent the violin or be devoured by the void. ~ Azar Nafisi

I'm a perfectly equipped failure. ~ 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

One can believe James's claim to an "imagination of disaster"; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such 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. ~ Azar Nafisi

I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me. ~ Azar Nafisi

Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank - you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else - we either plan it or dream it. ~ Azar Nafisi

The fact is I don't know what I want, and I don't know if I am doing the right thing. I've always been told what is right - and suddenly I don't know anymore. I know what I don't want, but I don't know what I want,' she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched. ~ Azar Nafisi

It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really. ~ 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

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

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

In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so provident or benign. ~ Azar Nafisi

Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer's skill. ~ Azar Nafisi

Imagine you are walking down a leafy path ... The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm. Is it raining? You look up. The sky is still deceptively sunny ... seconds later another drop. Then, with the sun still perched in the sky, you are drenched in a shower of rain. This is how memories invade me, abruptly and unexpectedly ... ~ Azar Nafisi

The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another. ~ Azar Nafisi

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry? ~ Azar Nafisi

He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer. ~ Azar Nafisi

We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent
namely ideology. This was a country where all gestures, even the most private, were interpreted in political terms. The colors of my head scarf or my father's tie were symbols of Western decadence and imperialist tendencies. Not wearing a beard, shaking hands with members of the opposite sex, clapping or whistling in public meetings, were likewise considered Western and therefore decadent, part of the plot by imperialists to bring down our culture. ~ Azar Nafisi

You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ ~ Azar Nafisi

Poshlust, Nabokov explains, is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. ~ 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

She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols. Where do your loyalties lie, Mr. Bahri, with Islam or the state? ~ Azar Nafisi

Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer. ~ Azar Nafisi

In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed. ~ Azar Nafisi

How could God be so cruel as to create a Muslim woman with so much flesh and so little sex appeal? ~ Azar Nafisi

In class, we were discussing the concept of the villain in the novel. I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image. ~ Azar Nafisi

Well, that was in 1995 when I resigned from my last academic job. ~ 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

A novel is not an allegory ... it is a 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. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed. ~ Azar Nafisi

I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself. ~ Azar Nafisi

[V]alue your dreams but ... be wary of them also, ... look for integrity in unusual places. ~ 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

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. ~ Azar Nafisi

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. ~ 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

Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams. ~ Azar Nafisi

The most important result of the encounter [in the preceding anecdote] is the scholar's startling discovery of the roundness of the earth ... Instinctively realizing the connection between the foreigner's presence, the roundness of the earth, and future changes and upheavals, he finally announces, Yes, the earth is round, the women will start to think, and as soon as they begin to think, they will become shameless. ~ Azar Nafisi

Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran. ~ Azar Nafisi

The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokovs fascinating creations, possibly a word he invented. I said I associate Upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be a name of a dance- you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me". Manna suggested that the word upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in parentheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahashid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting" Upsilamba" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And for Nassrin it was a magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures. ~ Azar Nafisi

I have two things to say to that, he said. First, none of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them. And second, you always talk about the effect of "these people" on you. Have you ever thought about your effect on them? ~ Azar Nafisi

The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me. ~ Azar Nafisi

Looking back on that time it seems to me that such rapture over Tarkovsky by an audience most of whom would not have known how to spell his name, and who would under normal circumstances have ignored or even disliked his work, arose from our intense sensory deprivation. 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. ~ 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

Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable. ~ 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

We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy. ~ Azar Nafisi

She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should all become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that? ~ Azar Nafisi

After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used by the West, especially America, to corrupt and incite Iranian youth, and finally closed down all the Humanities departments in Iran's universities. ~ Azar Nafisi

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. 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. ~ 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

As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, "Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves." I always associate Khomeini's death with Negar's simple pronouncement - for she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him. ~ Azar Nafisi

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. ~ Azar Nafisi

Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum. ~ Azar Nafisi

It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.

What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then.

Dreams, Mr Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.

When I left the class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream? ~ Azar Nafisi

It's frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions. ~ Azar Nafisi

These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry. ~ Azar Nafisi

Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the
cruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive.
We also instinctively recognized poshlust-not just in others, but in ourselves. This was one reason
that art and literature became so essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity.
What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely
alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between
your savior and your executioner. ~ 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

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 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

Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it. ~ Azar Nafisi

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. This 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 shabbiness of the subject matter. ~ Azar Nafisi

What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves. ~ Azar Nafisi

It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom. ~ Azar Nafisi

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. ~ Azar Nafisi

She explained why all the normal acts of life had become small acts of rebellion and political insubordination to her and to other young people like her. All her life she was shielded. She was never let out of sight; she never had a private corner in which to think, to feel, to dream, to write. She was not allowed to meet any young men on her own. Her family not only instructed her on how to behave around men - they seemed to think they could tell her how she should feel about them as well. What seems natural to someone like you, she said, is so strange and unfamiliar to me. ~ 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

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time. ~ Azar Nafisi

Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past. ~ 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

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

You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you'll not only miss the people you love, but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you'll never be the same again ~ Azar Nafisi

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

You don't understand their mentality. They won't accept your resignation because they don't think you have the right to quit. They are the ones who decide how long you should stay and when you should be dispensed with. More than anything else, it was this arbitrariness that had become unbearable. ~ Azar Nafisi

Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested. ~ Azar Nafisi

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching. ~ 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

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? ~ 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

How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love? ~ Azar Nafisi

It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the institution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony. ~ Azar Nafisi

You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual? ~ Azar Nafisi

My toe as a lethal weapon! ~ 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

Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force. ~ Azar Nafisi

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. ~ Azar Nafisi

It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster ... I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen ... ~ Azar Nafisi

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences ~ Azar Nafisi

Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model. ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect. ~ Azar Nafisi

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. ~ Azar Nafisi