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Quotes by Turkish Authors
"The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong."
"The biggest awakening is the awakening from the childish deceptions and the invented tales of the religion."
"I read a book one day and my whole life was changed."
"To attack terrorism, firstly attack the ignorance which is the greatest source of terrorism! Attack the ignorance worldwide because ignorance often creates sick minds!"
"By reading books, you lose your old self and you find your new self! To read is to travel from self to another self!"
"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."
"If ten men are trying to lynch one allegedly vile person, than we can be completely sure that there are ten vile people and one allegedly vile person over there! Don't forget, violence makes you a low man!"
"There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god."
"If you are given a hundred city, refuse it without any hesitation; if you are given a lovely wooden cottage in the middle of a forest, accept it without any hesitation because all you need is just a peace of mind!"
"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."
"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."
"Let the boundlessness be your boundary!"
"It seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising out memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room."
"When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end."
"Any religion which uses the words such as hell, fire, curse, burning, amputating can never be a religion of love because a religion of love must only use the language of love, must only use only the sweet words of affection, not the words of darkness and torture!"
"To give light to others, you must first take light from others!"
"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."
"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 ."
"It's not the content, but the form of thought that counts."
"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 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,..."
"In the middle of nowhere, an old wooden bridge is a golden bridge!"
"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.'"
"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."
"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow."
"We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful."
"I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to write my novels or paint."
"Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil."
"Eagle rises to the top of the precipice with its wings; man, to the top of the honour, with his morals!"
"Don't be afraid of an endless road, but the road with an end!"
"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 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."
"Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure."
"Those who can truly see, know."
"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!"
"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."
"If you are going down with dignity, you will be admired as if you are going up!"
"Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space."
"Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings people like us so close to God. It's the fact that no one is more curious than we are to learn why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world."
"Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave."
"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!"
"He who hates easiness in life will always find a though mountain to climb!"
"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!"
"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?"
"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."
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