What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive?… — Azar Nafisi Copy Share Image
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate… — 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
