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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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"Lifting her lovely and longing face towards the inaudible chant of the sun, she drifted through her time, through space, through the concatenate cells of her unfolding self. Where to now, Abbzug? You're twenty-eight and a half years old, Abbzug."
"If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself."
"We cannot face up to what lies ahead, without facing up to what lies within."
"I take showers to think."
"If you feel that you are going without go within."
"A brutal, relentless self-analysis lies at the heart of all despair."
"When you are in action it is very difficult to get a bird's eye view of your own performance! Find some time to introspect."
"Who can claim to know you more than you know yourself? You have been with yourself all your life, after all."
"A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle."
"That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church."
Explore more quotes by Orhan Pamuk
"Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something," said Kadife. "Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining anything."
"In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries."
"Suddenly Ka realized he was in love with Apek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread."
"Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared."
"I must be myself, I said over and over. I must forget these people buzzing inside my head, I must forget their voices, their smells, their demands, their love, their hate, and be myself, I must be myself, I told myself, as i gazed down at the legs resting so happily on the stool, and I told myself again as I looked up to watch the smoke I'd blown up to the ceiling; I must be myself, because if I failed to be myself, I become the person they wanted me to be; if I had to be that insufferable person, I'd rather be nothing at all. It would be better if I didn't exist,..."
"A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words."
"I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me."
"I don't much care whether rural Anatolians or Istanbul secularists take power. I'm not close to any of them. What I care about is respect for the individual."
"The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They're all intertwined."
"The Museum of Innocence' is not about politics; it's a love story, but I think it's political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman."
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