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
taken possibility away-from-you
It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.
iran government people
Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.
hurt memories independent
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.
character heart destiny
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.
fate shoes imagination
Only curiosity about the fate of others, the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, and the will to enter their world through the magic of imagination, creates this shock of recognition. Without this empathy there can be no genuine dialogue, and we as individuals and nations will remain isolated and alien, segregated and fragmented.
sex islamic republic
Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.
self issues evil
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.
imagination littles great-work
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.
struggle islam colonialism
Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.
love change strange-places
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.