Orhan Pamuk Quotes

When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one," I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. "Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest , most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them." (p.191)
Orhan Pamuk
The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.
Orhan Pamuk
Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared.
Orhan Pamuk
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?
Orhan Pamuk
I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on...." - Conversations with Yahya Kemal
Orhan Pamuk
It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it.
Orhan Pamuk
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.
Orhan Pamuk
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.
Orhan Pamuk
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.
Orhan Pamuk
The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why she now felt that she was on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time.
Orhan Pamuk
Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?
Orhan Pamuk
The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep.
Orhan Pamuk
...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.
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
...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 ideals--only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.' 'Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.
Orhan Pamuk
Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.
Orhan Pamuk
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?
Orhan Pamuk
I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.
Orhan Pamuk
There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? The only harm they do is to themselves. But that's all they ever wanted in the first place. They feel so guilty about the suffering of the poor, and are so keen to share it, that they make their lives miserable on purpose.
Orhan Pamuk
As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them
Orhan Pamuk
How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's 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? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?
Orhan Pamuk
To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.
Orhan Pamuk
In the cities of the European Franks, women roam about exposing not only their faces, but also their brightly shining hair (after their necks, their most attractive feature), their arms, their beautiful throats, and even, if what Ive heard is true, a portion of their gorgeous legs; as a result, the men of those cities walk about with great difficulty, embarrassed and in extreme pain, because, you see, their front sides are always erect and this fact naturally leads to the paralysis of their society. Undoubtedly, this is why each day the Frank infidel surrenders another fortress to us Ottomans.
Orhan Pamuk
Maybe you've heard the story of the man who was so driven by this curiosity that he roamed among soldiers in battlefields. He sought a man who had died and returned to life amid the wounded struggling for their lives in pools of blood, a soldier who could tell him about the secrets of the Otherworld. But one of Tamerlane's warriors, taking the seeker for one of the enemy, cleared him in half with a smooth stroke of his scimitar, causing him to conclude that in the Hereafter man is split in two.
Orhan Pamuk
These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget. --- from the notebooks of Celal Salik
Orhan Pamuk
Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.
Orhan Pamuk
Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbelievers.
Orhan Pamuk
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.
Orhan Pamuk
It's not the content, but the form of thought that counts.
Orhan Pamuk
My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero.
Orhan Pamuk
To 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
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.
Orhan Pamuk
The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong.
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
Those who can truly see, know.
Orhan Pamuk
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,...
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
My 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.13
Orhan Pamuk
…he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.
Orhan Pamuk
I 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
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.
Orhan Pamuk
In 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
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.
Orhan Pamuk
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.
Orhan Pamuk
We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction
Orhan Pamuk
...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
What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination.
Orhan Pamuk
Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.
Orhan Pamuk
Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something," said Kadife. "Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining anything.
Orhan Pamuk
Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness
Orhan Pamuk
I 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
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.
Orhan Pamuk
What 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
As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn't get the image of their lips out of my mind. But by now I'd realised I'd not even be kissing myself; I'd be kissing the mirror.
Orhan Pamuk
Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness.
Orhan Pamuk
A man could be at the coffee-house every evening laughing and playing cards with his friends, he could have so much fun with his classmates that there is never a moment they arent´t exploding into laughter, he could spend every hour of the day chatting with his intimates, but if that man has been abandoned by God, he´d still be the loneliest man on earth.
Orhan Pamuk
The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.
Orhan Pamuk
I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.
Orhan Pamuk
Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere
Orhan Pamuk