For if a lover’s face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.
My childhood proved to me that there could be no enjoyment of football without community. But it becomes difficult when this community is having problems with its identity. That’s when we experience all possible forms of nationalist exaggeration.
Enjoyment of football is part of the social context, and I have lost my faith in this social context.
Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.
After all, a woman who doesn’t love cats is never going to be make a man happy.
Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.
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.
People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.
I believe that it isn’t victories but defeats that promote nationalism.
The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.
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.
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.
In fact, my entire childhood consisted of looking at photographs in which the viewer sees the ball behind the line, looking through the goal net, and the poor goalkeeper in front of the net.
Love is a sacred silence.
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.
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.
I do not believe in a personal connection to God; that’s where it gets transcendental.
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?
Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy.
I consider myself a person who comes from a Muslim culture. In any case, I would not say that I’m an atheist. So I’m a Muslim who associates historical and cultural identification with this religion.