FastSaying

When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.


Azar Nafisi

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who ris...
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS My father had to go back to Iran to take care of his father when I was 13 and was detained for six y...
DARA KHOSROWSHAHI I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Pittsburgh. I've never been to Iran, I don't speak the ...
SAID SAYRAFIEZADEH Mohammed Taheri-Azar, a naturalized U.S. citizen hailing from Iran, crashed his SUV into a crowd at ...
PETER BERGEN I'm a first - I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croa...
OTTESSA MOSHFEGH I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and sta...
AZAR NAFISI I was 13 and at summer camp when I had my first kiss.
CARLOS PENA, JR. At a time when we are facing threats from nations such as North Korea and Iran, and attempting to co...
ELLEN TAUSCHER My dream was to become a ballet dancer, but after a year in bed with rheumatic fever at 13, I had gr...
CARMEN DELL'OREFICE It was sanctions that drove Iran to the negotiating table in the first place.
TED DEUTCH I booked my first series when I was 13. Acting kind of took control because I was just going from pa...
VANESSA MORGAN I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.
RICHARD DAWKINS I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES Iran's most formidable modern leader, Reza Shah Pahlavi, was obsessed with the idea of building ...
STEPHEN KINZER I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always be...
JEFF BUCKLEY I populated 'The Bourne Identity' with real characters from American history, specifically c...
DOUG LIMAN While sanctions would be aimed at coercing Iran to abandon its nuclear-testing program, the world is...
JACQUES ROUSSEAU While sanctions would be aimed at coercing Iran to abandon its nuclear testing program, the world is...
JACQUES ROUSSEAU Before I was born, my mom and my dad, they used to rescue dogs, so at one point, they had 13 dogs. A...
MAISIE WILLIAMS Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more inte...
AZAR NAFISI Actually my birthday was really March 13, but when you get to be this age you do what you want to do...
ROY HAYNES I was famous from the age of 13, and after a while you become immune to it - in a good way. You look...
A. R. RAHMAN My first gig was at Radio City Music Hall when I was 13.
QUESTLOVE When I was 13, I entered the seminary in the hope of becoming a priest. But I often found myself hel...
JOEL ROBUCHON You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, ...
JACQUES PEPIN When al-Qaeda was on the run from Afghanistan crossing through Iran, some were arrested and they are...
AKBAR HASHEMI RAFSANJANI When I was 13 I was diagnosed with malignant brain cancer. I spent 13 weeks in the hospital getting ...
DELBERT TEILLE A celebrated and hugely popular actress in her native Iran, Ahangarani first landed on the radar of ...
NAZANIN BONIADI I was 13 when I had my first bout of insomnia. My family was in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the summer, ...
SIRI HUSTVEDT My father left school at 14, my mother at 13. My father was clever and well-read. He took a newspape...
ROBERT HARRIS Syria is a terrorist state by any definition and is so classified by the State Department. I happen ...
ALEXANDER HAIG I feel that it means a lot to the people of Iran that my film is represented at the Oscars, and it m...
ASGHAR FARHADI Ladies and gentlemen, the relevant question is not when Iran will get the bomb. The relevant questio...
EHUD BARAK It was a good game. I thought at no point was anyone in control. It was one of the best defensive ef...
BRIAN HENDERSON They could not find evidence which shows that Iran has diverted from its peaceful purposes of nuclea...
MANOUCHEHR MOTTAKI On the nuclear issue, the first point is that the entire world must recognize that Iran does not see...
HASSAN ROUHANI Interpreting dreams for Iranians was just as much a sacrament as reading coffee cups was for Turks
SOROOSH SHAHRIVAR So while there is no evidence at all that Iran has any significant quantity of nuclear material or a...
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE At the age of 13, I wanted to be the best dog trainer in the world. That was my wish.
CESAR MILLAN Syria is a terrorist state by any definition and is so classified by the State Department. I happen ...
ALEXANDER HAIG I made my first million pounds at the age of 26. As a little girl, I said I would retire when I had ...
CAPRICE BOURRET Have you ever noticed that when anyone criticizes the State of Israel, they seem always to make clea...
CAMILLO MAC BICA Iran is a complete Windows country when it comes to the Office automation side.
SATYA NADELLA Iran has long sponsored terrorists who carry out homicide bombings in Israeli cities. However, it is...
JOHN DOOLITTLE I'm not prone (to injuries) at all. I had an unfortunate injury and I was surgically repaired. I cho...
FRANK THOMAS First of all, there are aspects of culture which are really reprehensible, and we should [all] fight...
AZAR NAFISI When I was a kid. I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but...
JEFF BUCKLEY I'm not in charge of judgments in Iran. The judicial system in Iran is an independent body of it...
MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD The Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Defense Ministry control all the levers of the nuclear prog...
ALIREZA JAFARZADEH If you impose sanctions theoretically on Iran, then it would be appropriate to ask a question: Who i...
ANDREI DENISOV I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and...
BEVERLY SILLS I had never heard of Cingular, but they needed people to jump on trampolines. Well, when I was 13, I...
NATE TORRENCE I am really bothered when I see my friends facing problems back in Iran, but I tell them that not al...
BAHMAN GHOBADI Iran welcomes dialogue with any other states. I wrote a letter to the three European states inviting...
ALI LARIJANI Iran continues to explicitly threaten to destroy the state of Israel, America's most important a...
BILL FLORES I was working probably at the age of 10, when I had my first paper route. I had every different kind...
HOWARD SCHULTZ We call for Iran to show more flexibility and cooperation, and we call for a continuation of dialogu...
SULEIMAN AWAD A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran's northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdista...
PAT BUCHANAN The second album was emotionally exhausting and my life felt like it had become very serious at a ve...
DELTA GOODREM The Saudis vowed that production would be left unchanged despite the calls to cut production by the ...
PHIL FLYNN At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetr...
EAVAN BOLAND I met Woz when I was 13, at a friend's garage. He was about 18. He was, like, the first person I...
STEVE JOBS I was discovered in Paris when I was there on a school trip at the age of 13. After that, my mom cam...
MAUD WELZEN Years ago, I predicted that Iran would take over Iraq. Iran and Iraq used to fight back and forth.
DONALD TRUMP At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too ...
SALVATORE QUASIMODO Russia is in a position where it can influence further developments in the situation surrounding Ira...
GRIGORY YAVLINSKY Bowling was my first love. Beating my mother for the first time when I was 13 or 14 was a major acco...
JEROME BETTIS We hope that Iran will not become an obstacle to peace and security in Iraq.
KING ABDULLAH When my father died it left me without any financial support. At the age of fifteen I ran off to Bue...
EVITA PERóN Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and wi...
SEAN O'CASEY Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and wi...
SEAN O'CASEY The imperceptible process of age has a point which, once passed, cannot be retraced. I knew I had pa...
HARRY LEWIS When we first arrived, it was large groups of people in large areas with no stimulation. By the time...
LAURIE SMITH In my role as a spokesperson for Amnesty International U.S.A. and as a supporter of various charitab...
NAZANIN BONIADI I expect both the UN and Iran not to want a confrontation and therefore we don't get any clear decis...
ANETTE EINARSEN I expect both the UN and Iran not to want a confrontation, and therefore we don't get any clear deci...
ANETTE EINARSEN It became natural for him. It wasn't long before he picked it up and he had the stroke down. We flip...
LARRY HERMIDA Part of the reason I sort of shot out like a cannon out of Michigan and left home at such an early a...
MADONNA CICCONE I know that my cell phone in Iran... is bugged, and they listen in, and my emails, I'm sure, are...
HOOMAN MAJD We are neighboring an affected country and Iran is on the route of migrating birds twice a year. Ira...
KAMYAR DAHIM I hadn't planned to go into the family business. I was at an age where I wanted to go save the world...
CLARK KEPLER My first guitar was like a campfire guitar. And it was left at a house that my family had moved into...
JIMMY PAGE Iran will not bend. Iran will be a nuclear fuel producer and supplier within a decade.
CYRUS NASSERI I think I really produce my best work in Iran.
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI Friendship is a double-edged sword one side it can be great and true but the other side it spells be...
GARY F EVANS... It was known in the mid 90s already that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous tyrant that he had already l...
DOUGLAS FEITH The Shah (of Iran) was - despite the travesties of retroactive myth - a dedicated reformer
HENRY KISSINGER Once I had learnt my twelve times table (at the age of three) it was downhill all the way.
FRED HOYLE All Iran wants to do is to enjoy the right under the NPT, the right which has been denied to it for ...
SIRUS NASSERI We are looking now at setting up teams in all the surrounding countries, such as Turkmenistan and Ir...
STEPHANIE BUNKER I always wanted to work with Diane, ... I've probably had a crush on her since A Little Romance (197...
JOHN CUSACK That really jumped out at me. Among nasty neighbors, Iran was clearly the greater threat.
LEWIS ROTH When I was 15 and dreaming about being a rock star... I thought the whole point of it was to get chi...
RIVERS CUOMO The use of military force against Iran would be very dangerous. It would be very provocative. The on...
RUDY GIULIANI My last passport, I had North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Liberia, Guinea... I had, like,...
SHANE SMITH When my father returned home on the twenty-first of August 1983, he had a speech prepared. Filipinos...
BENIGNO AQUINO III I first went to Cambodia in 2002, primarily, as it turned out, to change diapers. My wife had work i...
MICHAEL PATERNITI They're terrified. When you speak to someone for the first few minutes they're speechless. You now h...
RIAD KAHWAJI The funds like to 'whip up the surf,' which is where Iran enters the picture.
JULIAN PHILLIPS By declaring Iran non-compliant with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as w...
JACK STRAW

More Azar Nafisi

Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to pro...
AZAR NAFISI The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn ...
AZAR NAFISI You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.
AZAR NAFISI I would like to think of my own status as what you called 'citizen of the world' or a 'citizen of a ...
AZAR NAFISI Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
AZAR NAFISI You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.
AZAR NAFISI Many times I tell my American students my Iranian students understood how valuable [freedom] is beca...
AZAR NAFISI Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more inte...
AZAR NAFISI First of all, there are aspects of culture which are really reprehensible, and we should [all] fight...
AZAR NAFISI Whenever religion, no matter where it comes from, when it claims to spread the word of God through [...
AZAR NAFISI Iranian fiction has entered a new era...The Islamic Revolution has shaken all values and norms withi...
AZAR NAFISI Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to cha...
AZAR NAFISI The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scot...
AZAR NAFISI Those in the west who dismiss the repressiveness of laws against women in countries like Iran, no ma...
AZAR NAFISI Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their histo...
AZAR NAFISI Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological ...
AZAR NAFISI I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and sta...
AZAR NAFISI I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our cultur...
AZAR NAFISI In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, esp...
AZAR NAFISI Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-c...
AZAR NAFISI You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how compl...
AZAR NAFISI . . . none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with ev...
AZAR NAFISI Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they...
AZAR NAFISI We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and vi...
AZAR NAFISI You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss ...
AZAR NAFISI I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly ...
AZAR NAFISI A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that mo...
AZAR NAFISI [A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by ...
AZAR NAFISI I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we ...
AZAR NAFISI That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourni...
AZAR NAFISI The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights,...
AZAR NAFISI It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are inc...
AZAR NAFISI For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's strug...
AZAR NAFISI I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.
AZAR NAFISI She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and ...
AZAR NAFISI When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the...
AZAR NAFISI I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to i...
AZAR NAFISI This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stonin...
AZAR NAFISI The biggest crime in Nabokov's 'Lolita' is imposing your own dream upon someone else'...
AZAR NAFISI America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
AZAR NAFISI I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.
AZAR NAFISI Well, that was in 1995 when I resigned from my last academic job.
AZAR NAFISI People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was n...
AZAR NAFISI A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one...
AZAR NAFISI Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.
AZAR NAFISI When I left class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how si...
AZAR NAFISI Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which ...
AZAR NAFISI You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...like you'll not only miss the people ...
AZAR NAFISI None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you...
AZAR NAFISI It's the state and local distribution plans that will define victory.
ALEX AZAR We are overdue for the next pandemic. None of us, nobody, would have immunity.
ALEX AZAR Nothing from my personal experiences with him would ever have led me to question his integrity, his ...
ALEX AZAR It is so critical that on every level, every individual becomes prepared.
ALEX AZAR The looming threat of a global influenza pandemic demands global, regional and national attention, a...
ALEX AZAR We've got to be prepared on the local level.
ALEX AZAR Any community that fails to prepare -- with the expectation that the federal government can or will ...
ALEX AZAR It will not be a cause for panic. It will not be a cause for people to stop hunting. It will not be ...
ALEX AZAR I liked the look in Carolyn's eyes when she started the second half. She walked out on the court, hi...
JAN AZAR But she's got to lead us.
JAN AZAR I don't think we'll do anything differently. We'll try to put a lot of pressure on them.
JAN AZAR They played like seniors at the end, and we've got to make sure they continue to do that throughout ...
JAN AZAR We haven't seen the new study yet, and we're not in the habit of prejudging these sorts of things. (...
LARA AZAR He'll look forward to what they have to tell them.
LARA AZAR In general, it (the study) appeared to have succeeded in gathering and combining a lot of different ...
LARA AZAR Oh, boy, that never happened.
LARA AZAR We're keeping a very close eye on it, but at this point, nothing seems to point to the need for a st...
LARA AZAR We had another paper that ran the whole thing almost (verbatim) ... and we finally got that paper to...
LARA AZAR Randall's a good guy, and the governor looks forward to working with him in his role as speaker.
LARA AZAR The main purpose is to visit troops as their commander in chief to relay the support of the folks ba...
LARA AZAR With Central Oregon's phenomenal growth, it attracts competition. We feel that, the more choices the...
PAUL AZAR The sole purpose of universal justice is to keep man's character in balance
JUDY AZAR LEBLANC Those whose eyes are open cannot see for they are blinded by the lust of all that is around them, an...
JUDY AZAR LEBLANC Do not let one hand say to another, 'Stop, for I have already given'
JUDY AZAR LEBLANC For the beauty that adorns the earth is not imitation
JUDY AZAR LEBLANC Ask not 'who will love me?' but rather, 'whom can I love?'
JUDY AZAR LEBLANC Freedom is to forgive one another for a perceived wrongdoing
JUDY AZAR LEBLANC When a customer receives the heat sink, we have tested it thoroughly, thus in almost every case, we ...
DR. KAVEH AZAR I advise engineers to start by performing first-order calculations to see where a heat-transfer prob...
DR. KAVEH AZAR Misunderstanding transpired, when common sense became the essence.
MOHAMMAD NAVID NAFISI BAHABADI