239 Quotes by Azar Nafisi

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.

Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure.

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.

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

A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one interpretation of the faith, and to accept the new political role of the clergy. Father felt that this spelled the end of Islam in our country, and he did have a point. ‘No foreign power,’ he said, ’could destroy Islam the way these people have.

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.

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.

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.

Our patents’ old age shocks us in the same manner that our children’s growth to maturity does, but without the joy.