Orhan Pamuk Quotes

...and awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one’s lips but of one’s entire body to a lover’s mercy, we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere

~ Orhan Pamuk

The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.

~ 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

...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

We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction

~ 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

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

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

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

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

…he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.

~ 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

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

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

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

Those who can truly see, know.

~ 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

The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong.

~ 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

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

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

It's not the content, but the form of thought that counts.

~ 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

Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbelievers.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them

~ Orhan Pamuk