Quotes from Azar Nafisi

Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it.

Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy—even in the books, there were few men for her.

All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.

Sempre mantive o hábito prazeroso dos tempos de faculdade, de sublinhar passagens e fazer anotações. Grande parte de minhas notas de Orgulho e Preconceito, A herdeira, O morro dos ventos uivantes, Madame Bovary e Tom Jones foi feita durante as noites de insônia. 224

We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the things we have to be thankful for! 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 once heard my father tell a friend that his relationship with my mother reminded him of a story by Attar, the twelfth-century Persian mystic poet, about a man who fearlessly rode a ferocious lion. When the narrator followed this brave man to his home, he was shocked to see how easily he was cowed by his wife. How could a man who was not afraid of a fierce beast be so intimidated by his own wife? His host shot back: If it weren't for what happens at home I could never ride a lion.

You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you'll not only miss the people you love, but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you'll never be the same again

A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.

Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum.

The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another.

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.

Books know no limits or borders, they create longings and unexpected passions, they pose more questions than answers. They represent the unruly world, filled with contradictions and complications, a world that threatens the totalitarian mindset by being beyond its control.

I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.

our true home, our true history, was in our poetry.

These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen's novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose.

Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine will suddenly give way to showers and storms.

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes.

she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.

V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.

Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it.

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

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

Est-ce que nous considérons que tout est acceptable, que nous n'avons aucune responsabilité envers les autres, que seule compte la satisfaction de nos besoin?

She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.