Orhan Pamuk quotes
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Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?
-- Orhan Pamuk -
Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?
-- Orhan Pamuk -
For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
A letter doesn't communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, 'Go on then, read what the letter tells you!' whereas the dull-witted will say, 'Go on then, read what he's written!
-- Orhan Pamuk -
There are two kind of men,' said Ka, in a didatic voice. 'The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girls eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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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.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
Suddenly Ka realized he was in love with Ä°pek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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‎The past is always an invented land.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead. we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something...I don't know...even an earring
-- Orhan Pamuk -
...every person has a star, every star has a friend, and for every person carrying a star there is someone else who reflects it, and everyone carries this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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It may not happen in the first instant, but within ten minutes of meeting a man, a woman has a clear idea of who he is, or at least who he might be for her, and her heart of hearts has already told her whether or not she's going to fall in love with him.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
I think a lot about the poems I wasn't able to write...I masturbrated...Solitude is essentially a matter of pride; you bury yourself in your own scent. The issue is the same for all real poets. If you've been happy for too long, you become banal. By the same token, if you've been unhappy for a long time, you lose your poetic power...Happiness and poverty can only coexist for the briefest time. Afterword either happiness coarsens the poet or the poem is so true it destroys his happiness.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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Love is a sacred silence.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
My unhappiness protects me from life.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you'll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favourite promontories
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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 our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil's ruse.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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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.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I'd leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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?
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
When you look into the faces of these quiet creatures who don't know how to tell stories--who are mute, who can't make themselves heard, who fade into the woodwork, who only think of the perfect answer after the fact, after they're back at home, who can never think of a story that anyone else will find interesting--is there not more depth and more meaning in them? You can see every letter of every untold story swimming on their faces, and all the signs of silence, dejection, and even defeat. You can even imagine your own face in those faces, can't you?
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
We had no desire to live in Istanbul, nor in Paris or New York. Let them have their discos and dollars, their skycrapers and supersonics transports. Let them have their radios and their color TV, hey, we have ours, don't we? But we have something they don't have. Heart. We have heart. Look, look how the light of life seeps into my very heart
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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Painting taught literature to describe.
-- Orhan Pamuk -
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.
-- Orhan Pamuk
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