Quotes from Azar Nafisi

the world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.

T]he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.

Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. 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…

the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the 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.

La curiosità è insubordinazione allo stato puro.

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.

Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure.

As Fitzgerald puts it, "No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

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

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

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?

These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards.

Whoever we were—and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not—we had become the figment of someone else's dreams.

Our world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below.

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.

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.

The class's favorite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law.

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.

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.

What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me.

La curiosité, disait-elle, est la forme la plus pure de l'insoumission.

One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel.