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Quotes by Turkish Authors
"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."
"If lots of men around you are growing a beard just because of political or ideological reasons, you refuse this, and if you have a beard, shave it off! Leave your herd to find yourself! Find your own style, not the style your ideology or your party is dictating on you! Remember, you build a sound character mostly through refusing, through saying no, through staying different!"
"In the middle of nowhere, an old wooden bridge is a golden bridge!"
"Don't be afraid of an endless road, but the road with an end!"
"To achieve a great success, you must first have yourself behind yourself as your greatest supporter!"
"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."
"Let the boundlessness be your boundary!"
"There are two groups of people: Herds and individual clever people. Because herds have numerical superiority, individual clever people remain weak in determining the right fate for the country! The solution: Disperse the herds, augment the individuals!"
"The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong."
"If you are going down with dignity, you will be admired as if you are going up!"
"Master Plato once said that Lux est umbra Dei, light is the shadow of God. I say this way: Light is the god of shadow!"
"To feel free, create a fog around yourself! And how can you do this? Be silent! When you are silent, people will not notice you much! You will be invisible, you will be inside the fog!"
"Eagle rises to the top of the precipice with its wings; man, to the top of the honour, with his morals!"
"Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?"
"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 ."
"Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right."
"I read a book one day and my whole life was changed."
"You need to lose yourself and disappear in the depths of the repetitions? Find a coast and watch the repetitive waves! Soon your mind vanishes away and when your mind disappears you disappear!"
"There is no honour in exploiting people and there is also no honour in exploiting animals! Using people or using animals for our own interests is nothing but an arrogant immorality!"
"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."
"Every nation needs a crystal clear mirror to see its stupidities, to see its hypocrisies, to see its faults and its evils! No nation is saint! Every nation's history is full of primitiveness and barbarity, full of wars and murders! Let every nation sees its face very clearly! Let them face their faces so that in the future they may be something better!"
"What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force."
"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."
"There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god."
"When you swim, be a part of the sea; when you walk, be a part of the road! Integrate with the universe! See it not as a distinct entity, but as your own continuation, as your own self!"
"He who hates easiness in life will always find a though mountain to climb!"
"Man needs air, man needs water, man needs food and man needs adventure also! Adventure is a medicine for the infinite boredom."
"If you cannot create a meaning, the things you see will always look meaningless to you!"
"No person can walk all alone because to walk all alone one must have no memories at all from the past!"
"I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.'"
"When you sweep the universe, nothing changes, only the things change their places; when the universe sweeps you, nothing changes, only the things change their places!"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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,..."
"He was like an autumn without leaves, he was unreal!"
"A cheerful music is a powerful light for the shadows of sorrow!"
"You can always challenge a big storm with a little boat and this will only prove how unserious person you are!"
"I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness."
"The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life."
"What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination."
"A silver-tongued charlatan and a half-wit society are made for each other! When these two come together in an election, a great disaster happens: Charlatan comes to power!"
"When you do something different, you are either blessed or cursed!"
"And awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one's lips but of one's entire body to a lover's mercy, we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender is love's darkest, deepest region."
"The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves."
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