Azar Nafisi Quotes

Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.

It’s part of growing up, I suppose…you always have to leave something behind you.

The reason you can never go home again isn't necessarily that places change, but people do. So nothing ever looks the same.

Its okay, Beth.I don't want my life to go back to the way it was before i met you.I thought i had it all,but really i was missing something. feel like a completely different person now.This might sound corny,but i feel like i've been asleep for a long time and you've just woken me up.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.

Life is strange. You keep moving and keep growing. Before you know it, you look back and think, "What was that?"

It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.

To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.

Faces come and faces go in circular rotation.But something yearns within to grow beyond infatuation.

Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

But the original was there as well—more jaded and rudimentary, functional rather than romantic. It fit not just the yellow house but another door, deep within my own heart. One that had been locked so tight for so long that I was afraid to even try it for fear of what might be on the other side

When it seems impossible that a deep connection with another person could just go away instead of changing form. It seems impossible that you will one day look up and say the words "I used to date someone who lived in that building," referring to a three-year relationship. As simple as if it was a pizza place that is now a dry cleaner's. It happens. Keep walking.

It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

It was hard to remember what the yard had looked like even twelve hours before, undisturbed and pristine. Like it takes so little to change something, but to make you forget the way it once was, as well.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

And that's when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I'm still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he's in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.

Outgrowing things we love is never a pleasant process.

When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

I don't make changes to confuse anyone. I'm just searching. That's what causes me to change. I'm just searching for myself.