"Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?"

"She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life."

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

"What is the meaning of it all, of this...of this world?'Mystery', I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps, 'mercy', but I wasn't certain of either."

"The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any."

"My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value in the west."

"The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory--of this there is no doubt."

"After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?"

"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?"

"Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen."

"When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it wasthis very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art."

"Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?"

"The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience."

"The secularists in Turkey haven't underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone."

"Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness."

"These political movements flourish on the margins of Turkish society because of poverty and because of the people's feeling that they are not being represented."

"If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope."

"I don't look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I've achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I take a shower and work on my next sentence until 1 P.M. After I've done emails and so on, I write again from 3 P.M. until 8 P.M.; then I socialise."

"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."

"Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness."

"There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well."

"My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions."

"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."

"After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy."

"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?"

"Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living."

"They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves."

"It's not enough to be oppressed, you must also be in the right. Most oppressed people are in the wrong to an almost ridiculous degree. What shall I believe in?"

"I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city."

"We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures."

"My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero."

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

"The gap between compassion and surrender is love's darkest, deepest region."

"Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we're being heroic, it usually means we're about to kill each other--or kill ourselves."

"To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form of a love who has left never to return: It is to grieve, dear reader, it is to weep."

"Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile."

"The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game."

"He quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working."

"Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."

"The waiting was torture, the worst Ka had ever known. It was this pain, this deadly wait, he now remembered, that had made him afraid to fall in love."

"A man could be at the coffee-house every evening laughing and playing cards with his friends, he could have so much fun with his classmates that there is never a moment they arent t exploding into laughter, he could spend every hour of the day chatting with his intimates, but if that man has been abandoned by God, he d still be the loneliest man on earth."

"In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty."

"Authoritarianism, an unrealistic occidental imagination - these issues will never be settled. Turkey will continue to take Europe as a model; it will continue to pursue its search for democracy."

"I don't want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning."

"Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached."

"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."

"The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony."

"Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness."

"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."

"Maybe you've heard the story of the man who was so driven by this curiosity that he roamed among soldiers in battlefields. He sought a man who had died and returned to life amid the wounded struggling for their lives in pools of blood, a soldier who could tell him about the secrets of the Otherworld. But one of Tamerlane's warriors, taking the seeker for one of the enemy, cleared him in half with a smooth stroke of his scimitar, causing him to conclude that in the Hereafter man is split in two."