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"My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously(...) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city ."
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"My heart broke and my mind opened, tragedy works in a funny way like that ~ what once tore me apart was actually what was setting my truth free."

"Day or night, good or bad, all things from within."

"People who are two faced, usually forget which mask they are wearing at some point in their life."

"We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember."

"If we let the drama of others' lives become our own, then we are no longer ourselves. We become the reflections of others' dramas and their lives, their tragedies, and their misfortunes become our own."

"I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary."

"I don't need psychologyI am not a sociopathNeither and Psychopath."

"Do not focus on your failings, for you will only encourage them. If you keep beating yourself up on the head over these, you will only reinforce them."

"If you don't believe in yourself,How can you ever believe in another?"
Explore more quotes by Orhan Pamuk

"I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries."

"A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience."

"Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings people like us so close to God. It's the fact that no one is more curious than we are to learn why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world."

"Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life."

"Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil."

"If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me."

"In our household doubts more troubling than these were suffered in silence. The spiritual void I have seen in so many of Istanbul's rich, Westernised, secularist families is evident in these silences. Everyone talks openly about mathematics, success at school, football and having fun, but they grapple with the most basic questions of existence - love,compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred - in trembling confusion and painful solitude. They light a cigarette, give their attention to the music on the radio, return wordlessly to their inner worlds."

"To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy."

"It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people."

"Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure."
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