Top 160 Azar Nafisi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.”

— Azar Nafisi

3. “I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.”

— Azar Nafisi

Featured in: Path Quotes, Rain Quotes

4. “You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn’t exist.”

— Azar Nafisi

5. “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.”

— Azar Nafisi

6. “The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.”

— Azar Nafisi

7. “It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.”

— Azar Nafisi

8. “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

9. “My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.”

— Azar Nafisi

10. “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.”

— Azar Nafisi

11. “With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.”

— Azar Nafisi

12. “She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.”

— Azar Nafisi

13. “Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose.”

— Azar Nafisi

14. “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 to immutable.”

— Azar Nafisi

15. “Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.”

— Azar Nafisi

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

— Azar Nafisi

17. “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

18. “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.”

— Azar Nafisi

19. “The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.”

— Azar Nafisi

20. “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.”

— Azar Nafisi

21. “I eat my heart out alone.”

— Azar Nafisi

22. “Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.”

— Azar Nafisi

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.”

— Azar Nafisi

26. “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

27. “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

28. “The more we die, the stronger we will become.”

— Azar Nafisi

29. “Art is as useful as bread.”

— Azar Nafisi

30. “Education’s goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.”

— Azar Nafisi

31. “The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.”

— Azar Nafisi

32. “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

33. “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche had said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

— Azar Nafisi

34. “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

35. “What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.”

— Azar Nafisi

36. “None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world’s evils; it’s all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.”

— Azar Nafisi

37. “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

38. “Stories are not mere flights of fantasy or instruments of political power and control. They link us to our past, provide us with critical insight into the present and enable us to envision our lives not just as they are but as they should be or might become. Imaginative knowledge is not something you have today and discard tomorrow. It is a way of perceiving the world and relating to it.”

— Azar Nafisi

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.”

— Azar Nafisi

44. “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

45. “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

46. “We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.”

— Azar Nafisi

47. “When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?”

— Azar Nafisi

48. “I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.”

— Azar Nafisi

49. “Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran.”

— Azar Nafisi

50. “That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was an odd way to start, but I did succeed in getting their attention. I explained that we would in the course of the semester read and discuss many different authors, but that one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness.”

— Azar Nafisi