Quotes from Azar Nafisi

Whoever fights monsters," Nietzsche had said, "should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies. I am twenty-seven. I don't know what it means to love. I don't want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is.You'd call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess.

Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect.

readers were born free and ought to remain free.

It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.

The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity.

Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. "A native of America who cannot read or write," said John Adams, "is as rare an appearance . . . as a Comet or an Earthquake.

Most people have a way of radiating their potential – not just what they are, but what they could become.

Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.

We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?

Primo Levi once said, "I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind." Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.

Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president or representative, your children's future, your way and view of life.

Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.

Did you ever dream this could happen to us? He said, No I didn't, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right.

Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived

Dreams,Mr.Nazari,are perfect ideals,complete in themselves.

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.

My toe as a lethal weapon!

When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby's. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of dream?

I have two things to say to that, he said. First, none of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them. And second, you always talk about the effect of these people on you. Have you ever thought about your effect on them?

Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.

The most important result of the encounter [in the preceding anecdote] is the scholar's startling discovery of the roundness of the earth . . . Instinctively realizing the connection between the foreigner's presence, the roundness of the earth, and future changes and upheavals, he finally announces, Yes, the earth is round, the women will start to think, and as soon as they begin to think, they will become shameless.

Could one really concentrate on one's job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?