Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
Azar NafisiRead
A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A novel challenges our beliefs, prompting self-reflection rather than adhering to traditional notions of morality.
This quote by Azar Nafisi highlights the profound impact literature can have on our understanding of morality. Rather than simply teaching a moral lesson, a novel has the power to disturb our complacency and make us question our own beliefs and the absolutes we hold. It suggests that the true purpose of a novel is to provoke thought and introspection, pushing us to confront the complexities of our convictions.
Themes
NovelMoralityLiteratureBeliefsSelf-ReflectionIntrospection
In practice
Example use cases
During a discussion on the impact of literature in a book club.
More from Azar Nafisi
All quotes →After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used by the West, especially America, to corrupt and incite Iranian youth, and finally closed down all the Humanities departments in Iran's universities.
Azar NafisiRead
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
Azar NafisiRead
I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?
Azar NafisiRead
I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
Azar NafisiRead
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
Azar NafisiRead
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For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Louis L'AmourRead
There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.
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Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
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In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.
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Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
Christopher HitchensRead
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
Barbara KingsolverRead