Azar Nafisi Quotes

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.

It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I escaped to New York, and then L.A., but when I dream of home, I still dream of my old house in Holmdel.

I sing 'Beirut' for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

When I left Spain, I had it very clear in my mind that I would return one day.

Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

People dreamed. People left. And they all came back.

Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see, Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me; In exile thy bosom shall still be my home, And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.

Everyone comes back. It makes no difference how far we wander, we always have our country, our land, in our souls and our minds.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

I was born in Iran, left at a very young age - less than a year old - and grew up and was educated in the West.

I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

Morocco is completely alive for me because I spent about a third of my life there. The first few times I went back to Casablanca, I walked through the streets and remembered how years earlier I had walked those same streets and prayed that a miracle would happen and I would leave and become famous.

I've done a lot of things away from my homeland.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

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.

After my grandmother passed away, I felt the urge to take my camera to her flat. I knew this flat from my childhood in Tel Aviv. Going to this flat was like going abroad; there was a real feeling of traveling across Tel Aviv and ending up in Berlin.

During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

If I knew I could never come back to Ireland, to England, I think I'd fall off the tree.

It's been the most astonishing year because I've been having a marvelous adventure, and yet I kind of sympathize with people who have to live in exile, because I've so missed England.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.