I was trying to think of something to say that would sound more meaningful, but when you get down to it, words aren’t very useful at baring our souls, they’re just something else to hide behind.
The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don’t even know where I belong.
The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.
Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of the Bosphorus and Istanbul’s dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. A.
If they spoke, it was in whispers.
Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn’t this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn’t it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?
There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes.
She felt herself age suddenly, but also knew what she now desired: to reconcile and grow old in peace, and have the wit to want nothing from the world.
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.
After all, nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.
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?
In order to find meaning and readerly pleasure in the universe the writer reveals to us, we feel we must search for the novel’s secret center, and we therefore try to embed every detail of the novel in our memory, as if learning each leaf of a tree by heart.
I’ve never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood.
Painting and happiness. I would like my dear readers who have given close attention to my story and my fate to bear these two things in mind, as they are the genesis of my world.
When there is not a breath of wind, the waters sometimes shudder as if from inside and take on the finish of washed silk.
I was supposed to be part of a story, but I fell from there like a leaf in autumn.
At times like this what matters is not our words but our demeanor, not the magnitude or elegance of our grief but the degree to which we can express fellowship with those around us. I sometimes think that our love of cigarettes owes nothing to the nicotine, and everything to their ability to fill the meaningless void and offer an easy way of feeling as if we are doing something purposeful.
Tidak cukup hanya menjadi pihak yang tertindas, kau juga harus menjadi pihak yang benar, karena sebagian besar orang yang tertindas dapat dipandang salah dari nyaris semua sudut pandang.
As Ka would later write, it may have been now, as they were holding each other and weeping, that Ipek discovered something for the first time: To live in indecision, to waver between defeat and a new life, offered as much pleasure as pain.
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.