To savour Istanbul’s back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them.
We embraced. This so pleased me that I felt no guilt. I let myself be borne away by sweet emotion. I hugged him tighter. I let him kiss me, and I kissed him back. And as we kissed, it was as if the entire world had entered a gentle twilight. I wished everybody could embrace each other the way we did. I faintly recalled that love was supposed to be like this.
Of course he was conceited: having devoured most of what had been accomplished before his time, he turned up his nose at it all; he had no doubt he’d do better; he had no equal; he knew he was more intelligent and creative than anyone else. In short, he was an average youth.
The tree is bent when it is young.
The larger and more colorful a city is, the more places there are to hide one’s guilt and sin; the more crowded it is, the more people there are to hide behind.
I’m not indignant,” I said indignantly.
Don’t let rich people make you feel ashamed. The only difference between us and them is that they got to Istanbul first and started making money before we did.
A person should love the life he has chosen enough to call it his own in the end.
Most of the time, being a Turk is either an excuse or a pretext for evil.
These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness.
I’m saying this to you as someone who’s spent years as a political exile. Listen to me: Life’s not about principles, it’s about happiness.
But if you don’t have any principles, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t be happy at all,” said Kadife. “That’s true. But 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.
The poem Ka wrote during the ensuing silence, without a single pause or missing word, he would later call ‘Heaven’. If he placed it on the ‘Imagination’ axis of the snowflake, far from the centre, right at the top, this was not to suggest that Heaven was the future of which we dream: for Ka, Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories.
I’ve accepted the city into which I was born in the same way I’ve accepted my body and my gender.
Is the need for a father always there, or do we feel it only when we are confused, or anguished, when our world is falling apart?
What we learned from these painstakingly detailed miniatures was how ephemeral all those ancient lives had been, how quickly they’d all been forgotten, and how vain we were to think that we could grasp the meaning of life and history by learning a handful of facts.
The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.
But don’t forget that arrogant men who think too much of themselves always end up alone.
They were so accustomed by now to the random coming and going of the lights that no one bothered anymore with the rituals of power outage.
There was scattered applause from the back, from people presumably in the habit of clapping at anything – or perhaps they were scared.
Only a poet – not a novelist, and certainly not a historian – would be able to describe the despair that began to seep through the city toward the middle of June.