Top 160 Azar Nafisi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.”

— Azar Nafisi

52. “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

53. “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.”

— Azar Nafisi

54. “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

55. “Fiction is an antidote, a reminder of the power of individual choice. Every novel has at its core a choice by at least one of its protagonists, reminding the reader that she can choose to be her own person, to go against what her parents or society or the state tell her to do and follow the faint but essential beat of her own heart.”

— Azar Nafisi

56. “Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.”

— Azar Nafisi

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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.”

— Azar Nafisi

60. “Other people’s sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly emphasize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does this say about my life, my pains, my anguish?”

— Azar Nafisi

61. “America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?”

— Azar Nafisi

62. “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.”

— Azar Nafisi

63. “I say “then, as now” because the revolution that imposed the scarf on others did not relieve Mahshid of her loneliness. Before the revolution, she could in a sense take pride in her isolation. 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

64. “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

65. “One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.”

— Azar Nafisi

66. “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

67. “We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.”

— Azar Nafisi

68. “I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.”

— Azar Nafisi

69. “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

70. “Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others.”

— Azar Nafisi

71. “Mais la magie vient du pouvoir du bien, de cette force qui nous dit que nous n’avons pas besoin de nous soumettre aux limites et restrictions que nous impose M. destin, comme l’appelle Nabokov.”

— Azar Nafisi

72. “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

73. “In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.”

— Azar Nafisi

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination.”

— Azar Nafisi

78. “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.”

— Azar Nafisi

79. “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

80. “All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.”

— Azar Nafisi

81. “The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe.”

— Azar Nafisi

82. “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

83. “For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women’s struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.”

— Azar Nafisi

84. “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

85. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.′ So declared Yassi in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly ironic, which on rare occasions, and this was one of them, bordered on the burlesque.”

— Azar Nafisi

86. “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

87. “German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” 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.”

— Azar Nafisi

88. “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

89. “I blame my generation for having neglected to teach our children that in life there are no safe places, that safety is an illusion. “Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark,” Baldwin said in an interview in 1961.”

— Azar Nafisi

90. “Switzerland had somehow become a bywordfor Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un- Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland.”

— Azar Nafisi

91. “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

92. “Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark,” Baldwin said in an interview in 1961. “Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”

— Azar Nafisi

93. “Shouldn’t he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress?”

— Azar Nafisi

94. “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

95. “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

96. “A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.”

— Azar Nafisi

97. “Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president or representative, your children’s future, your way and view of life.”

— Azar Nafisi

98. “I have now become something of an expert in the ways of “decisive” men. They are not firm, they just seem to be. Because they have a formula for everything, which they forcibly impose, they seem confident. But they cannot face the unexpected. They can be far less capable in a crisis than the seemingly fragile women they bully and are secretly afraid of.”

— Azar Nafisi

99. “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

100. “Primo Levi once said, “I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind.” Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.”

— Azar Nafisi