Quotes from Azar Nafisi

Il peggior crimine di un regime totalitario è costringere i cittadini, incluse le vittime, a diventare suoi complici.

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. 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.

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 . . .

When two of my cousins were killed by the Islamic regime, some of my relatives who were now on the side of the government called my uncle to congratulate him on the death of his son and daughter-in-law.

the hostility of tyrants to imagination and ideas—is as relevant as ever.

His critics, like H. G. Wells, blamed him for his mandarin attitude towards life, which prevented him from any involvement with the social and political issues of the day.

Only if I take my own life can I act without my husband's permission, she said, desperately and dramatically.

everybody leaves," said Mahshid, her eyes glued to the floor, "who will help make something of this country? How can we be so irresponsible?

That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all.

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.

Leggevamo a turno, a voce alta, e le parole sembravano salire in alto per poi ricadere su di noi come rugiada.

Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs? Well, that is the crux of the great novels xxx - the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.

When Huck tells Aunt Sally that no one but a nigger was killed and she expresses her joy at no one's being killed, this, as the saying goes, speaks volumes -- not about the inhumanity of slaves but about the utter blindness of a good-hearted, God-fearing woman.

While farce and tragedy have always been foils for each other, it is rare, she maintains, other than in works of Russian and southern literature, that they are superimposed one upon the other so that their effects are experienced simultaneously.

Un romanzo non è un'allegoria, è l'esperienza sensoriale di un altro mondo. Se non entrate in quel mondo, se non trattenete il respiro insieme ai personaggi, se non vi lasciate coinvolgere nel loro destino, non arriverete mai ad identificarvi con loro, non arriverete mai al cuore del libro. È cosi che si legge un romanzo: come se fosse qualcosa da inalare, da tenere nei polmoni. Dunque, cominciate a respirare.

the great works of 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. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.

She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency.

And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.

I opened it the way we used to open Hafez, closing our eyes, asking our question and letting our finger rest somewhere at random. It opened to the page in the middle of Burt Norton,' beginning with the lines At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor/fleshless./ Neither from not toward; at the still point,there the dance/is.

Criminals should not be tried. The trial of a criminal is against human rights. Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known that they were criminals," proclaimed Ayatollah Khomeini, responding to protests by international human rights organizations of the wave of executions that followed the revolution.

Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms. It was unpredictable: the regime would go through cycles of some tolerance, followed by a crackdown. Now, after a period of relative calm and so-called liberalization, we had again entered a time of hardships.

We have been talking about what Gatsby is all about and we've mentioned some themes, but there is an overall undercurrent to the novel which I think determines its essence and that is the question of loss, the loss of an illusion.

What choice does the king have but to kick the poets and storytellers out of his republic? And what choice does the poet have but to destabilize the philosopher king's power by speaking the truth?