01c. 1952 ADWhat 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
02c. 1952 ADWith 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
03c. 1952 ADI 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
04c. 1952 ADDespite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happinessOrhan Pamuk / quote ↗
05c. 1952 ADWomen kill themselves because they hope to gain something," said Kadife. "Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining anything.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
06c. 1952 ADEinstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
07c. 1952 ADWhat we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
08c. 1952 AD...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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
09c. 1952 ADWe're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinctionOrhan Pamuk / quote ↗
10c. 1952 ADContrary 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
11c. 1952 ADSuddenly Ka realized he was in love with İpek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
12c. 1952 ADIn 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
13c. 1952 ADBelieving 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
14c. 1952 ADI do know this much though: If a man resorts to wiles, guile and petty deceptions, it means he's nowhere near being in love.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
16c. 1952 ADMy prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of perserving certain moments for prosperity , and as time moved forwards I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives.To watch my uncle pose my brother a maths problem , and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier ; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying , with a half-smile , to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room,and at that very same moment to see a picture of him to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so that we could weave them into the present.When,in the tones ordinarily preserved for discussing the founding of a nation , my grandmother spoke of my grandfather who had died so young,and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls , it seemed that she , likes me , was pulled in two directions , wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection , savouring the ordinary life but still honouring the ideal.But even as I pondered these dilemmas-if you plucked a special moment from life and framed it , were you defying death , decay and the passage of time. or were you submitting to them ?-I grew very bored with them.pg.13Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
17c. 1952 ADSometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
18c. 1952 ADAfter 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?Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
19c. 1952 ADI 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,...Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
21c. 1952 ADLet 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
22c. 1952 ADThe essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
23c. 1952 ADA 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
24c. 1952 ADTo read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
