A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic – not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. 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

Azar Nafisi Quotes

The class went all right, and the ones after became easier. I was enthusiastic, naive and idealistic, and I was in love with my books.

— Azar Nafisi

After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.

— Azar Nafisi

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

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

— Azar Nafisi

Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into “us” and “them.

— Azar Nafisi

These characters depend to such a 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. Their reward is not happiness... what James’s characters gain is self-respect.

— 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 the Readers are like Dorothy or Alice: we step into this magical world in order to return and retell the story through our own eyes, thus giving new meaning to the story as well as to our lives.

— Azar Nafisi

Almost every day, my students would recount such stories. We laughed over them, and later felt angry and sad, although we repeated them endlessly at parties and over cups of coffee, in breadlines, in taxis. It was as if the sheer act of recounting these stories gave us some control over them; the deprecating tone we used, our gestures, even our hysterical laughter seemed to reduce their hold over our lives.

— Azar Nafisi

Every now and then I find myself thinking of something my daughter told me when she was in medical school: one sign that a patient is dying is that she feels no pain.

— Azar Nafisi

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

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.

— Azar Nafisi

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

Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure.

— Azar Nafisi

Dreams, Mr Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality?

— Azar Nafisi

The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction.

— 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

It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing.

— 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

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
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