Orhan Pamuk Quotes

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

...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 was...this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

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.

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

...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

…he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.

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

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

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.

I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

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.

Suddenly 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.

...at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.

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

This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

...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.

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.

The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.