Azar Nafisi Quotes

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

It's one of those dreams I thought would be unattainable for someone like me, who came from nowhere.

I do feel, in my dreamings and yearnings, so undiscovered by those who are able to help me.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.

My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?

Im one step ahead of my past, two steps behind my dream.

The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace. Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.

Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.

Isolation is a self-defeating dream.

The Iran I'm dreaming of maybe doesn't exist anymore.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

I think that was one of the things that happened, especially in Ireland, that you left in order to improve yourself, and you couldn't write home and tell people, 'Look, I'm really lonely,' because you'd realize how much those letters were going to matter, that you needed to put good news or uplifting news into them.

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

A whole stack of memories never equal one little hope.

I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis.

What interests me is whatever it is that allows the heart to continue to yearn for something the intelligence knows is impossible to have: a lost love, a shelter from life's blows, the return of a time past, even a connection to the dead.

As I've gotten older I've occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that's also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.

My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do.

But then, my entire life is bullshit. The best things in it have vanished, ghosts. Ghosts I'll admit I created.

I've reached the stage of my life where learning is so important to me. I go through the past enough when I play my old songs on stage. And I don't mind doing that. But I want to think about the future.

I strongly wish for what I faintly hope; like the daydreams of melancholy men, I think and think in things impossible, yet love to wander in that golden maze.

Deep down I know I could never be that innocent again, however much I'd like to be.

But you built me dreams instead.