The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep.
If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.
A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor.
The ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation.
He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself.
In the beginning the point was not to have a point, to escape the world in which everyone had to have a job, a desk, an office.
All the happiness and beauty that life had to offer only revealed themselves when his mind drifted off into fantasies of a world far removed from his own.
To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn’t treat it as a career.
With the engine stalled, we would notice the deep silence reigning in the park around us, in the summer villa before us, in the world everywhere. We would listen enchanted to the whirring of an insect beginning vernal flight before the onset of spring, and we would know what a wondrous thing it was to be alive in a park on a spring day in Istanbul.
Where there’s a lot of money to be made, there’s also a lot of blood to be spilled.
It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world.
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.
A person could wish for one thing and speak of another, and their fate, their kismet, was the thing that could bring the two together.
Like most Turkish men of my world who entered into this predicament, I never paused to wonder what might be going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I only fantasized about her.
But despair is what keeps love alive.
The difference lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner – the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques – inflict heartache on all who live among them. These.
Contrary to popular opinion, a man can shut love out if he wants to. But to do so, he must free himself not only from the woman who has bewitched him but also from the third person in the story, the ghost who has put temptation in his way.
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.
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.
Nothing makes you happy in life except love... Neither the books you write or cites you see... I am very lonely... If I say that I want to be here in this city close to you until the end of my life would you believe me?