top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Society quotes
"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
"Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful " but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away."
"Contrary to popular belief and hope, people don't usually come running when they hear a scream. That's not how humans work. Humans look at other humans and say, 'Did you hear a scream?' because the first scream might have been you screaming inside your head, or a horse backfiring."
"An uncultured mind often gets attracted by the extreme."
"It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too."
"The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff."
"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities " but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."
Explore more quotes by Orhan Pamuk
"At the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words."
"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,..."
"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."
"Every life is like a snowflake: individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one s own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of one s own snowflake."
"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 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."
"Because, as I would always tell myself so many years later, lying here in my bed: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so, Fatma?"
bottom of page