“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all.… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“Razieh had an amazing capacity for beauty. She said, You know, all my life I have lived in poverty. I had to… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“...but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“A novel is not an allegory...it is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination.… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid,… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
Imagine you are walking down a leafy path…The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“Such an act [testifying for an accused prison guard of the Shah's regime] can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature,… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
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… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“you cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be stubborn for something as well” — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
Visa for Avalon is a testament to the power of fiction. It illuminates the truth at the heart of what is commonly called reality.… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
“You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
