Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian writer and professor of English literature. She has resided in the United States since 1997 and became an American citizen in 2008...
NationalityIranian
ProfessionWriter
inspirational motivational book
The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.
passion past order
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.
pain loss unique
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.
past rights regimes
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
shoes different-dimensions literature
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. . .
dancing mind citizens
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.
reality limits fairy-tale
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.
self-esteem lying matter
With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
judging personality individual
those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.
dream reality color
Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
real trying fiction
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.
dream lonely past
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.
honesty people honest
She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
evil imagination soul
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.