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"I saw myself in the mirror, and from my expression I had a shocking intimation of the rift between my body and my soul. Whereas my face was drained by defeat and shock, inside my head was another universe: I now understood as an elemental fact of life that while I was here, inside my body was a soul, a meaning, that all things were made of desire, touch, and love, that what I was suffering was composed of the same elements."
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"Who can claim to know you more than you know yourself? You have been with yourself all your life, after all."

"I take showers to think."

"All answers that you seek can only be found within."

"You can find the answers to the most complicated questions of life from your deepest self. Pay attention and listen. Your inner self has to say something to you. Listen to that eternal entity within, and you shall discover the way through which you'll reach your goal."

"If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself."

"A brutal, relentless self-analysis lies at the heart of all despair."

"I sat in a boxWith walls on each side.Not too tall.Not too wide.To think.To ponder.To pray.To hide.I sat in a box and cried."

"Sometimes you should ask yourself if the world would be a better place without your existence, then you would know if you are on the right path or not."

"Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues."

"And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?"
Explore more quotes by Orhan Pamuk

"I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality."

"I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on...." - Conversations with Yahya Kemal."

"Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?"

"In the cities of the European Franks, women roam about exposing not only their faces, but also their brightly shining hair (after their necks, their most attractive feature), their arms, their beautiful throats, and even, if what Ive heard is true, a portion of their gorgeous legs; as a result, the men of those cities walk about with great difficulty, embarrassed and in extreme pain, because, you see, their front sides are always erect and this fact naturally leads to the paralysis of their society. Undoubtedly, this is why each day the Frank infidel surrenders another fortress to us Ottomans."

"With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole."

"Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul."

"Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?"
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