Orhan Pamuk

“Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they’d had to share their rooms with others.”

“I am so fortunate to be red! I'm fiery. I'm strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted.”

“Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories.”

“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.”

“Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.”

“Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness”

“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.”

“Herkes bilsin, çok mutlu bir hayat yaşadım.”

“Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?”

“La razón fundamental de mi soledad es que ni siquiera yo sé de qué historia formo parte.”

“¡Qué feliz estoy de ser el rojo! Soy fogoso y fuerte; sé que llamo la atención y que no podeis resistiros a mí.No me oculto: para mí el refinamiento no se manifiesta a través de la decisión y la voluntad. Me expongo abiertamente. No temo a los demás colores, ni a las sombras, ni a la multitud, ni a la soledad. ¡Qué hermoso es llenar con mi fuego triunfante una superficie que me está esperando! Allí donde me extiendo, brillan los ojos, se refuerzan las pasiones, se elevan las cejas y se aceleran los corazones. Miradme: ¡qué hermoso es vivir! Contempladme: ¡qué bello es ver! Vivir es ver. Aparezco en cualquier parte. La vida comienza conmigo, todo regresa a mí, creedme.”

“-"Explícale la sensación del rojo a alguien que nunca lo ha visto, maestro.-Si lo tocáramos con la punta de un dedo sería entre el hierro y el cobre. Si lo cogiéramos en la mano, quemaría. Si lo porbáramos tendría un sabor pleno como de carne salada. Si nos lo lleváramos a la boca, nos la llenaría. Si lo oliéramos, olería a caballo. Si oliera como una flor se parecería a una margarita, no a una rosa roja”

“My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously(...) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city .”

“And before long, the music, the views rushing past the window, my fathers voice and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one, and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway.”

“After a time, my hand had become as skilled as my eyes. So if I was drawing a very fine tree, it felt as if my hand was moving without me directly it. As I watched the pencil race across the page, I would look on it in amazement, as if the drawing were the proof of another presence, as if someone else had taken up residence in my body. As I marveled at his work aspiring to become his equal, another part of my brain was busy inspecting the curves of the branches, the placement of mountains, the composition as a whole, reflecting that I had created this scene on a blank piece of paper. My mind was at the tip of my pen, acting before I could think; at the same time it could survey what I had already done. This second line of perception, this ability to analyse my progress, was the pleasure this small artist felt when he looked at the discovery of his courage and freedom. To step outside myself , to know the second person who had taken up residence inside me, was to retrace the dividing line that appeared as my pencil slipped across the paper, like a boy sledding in the snow.”

“My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving 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, like me, was pulled in two direction , 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.”

“I amused myself with mental games in which I changed the focus, deceived myself, forgot altogether what had been troubling me or wrapped in a mysterious haze.We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity; veiling reality instead, hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a tea kettle has been spouting steam on winters day. Steamed-up windows make me feel hüzün, and I still love getting up and walking over to those windows to trace words on them with my finger. As I trace out words and figures on the steamy window, the hüzün inside me dissipates, and I can relax; after I have done all my writing and drawings, I can erase it all with the back of my hand and look outside. But the view itself can bring its own hüzün. The time has come to move towards a better understanding of this feeling that the city of Istanbul carries as its fate.”

“Çünkü bana göre siyaset, en sonunda bizim gibi olmayanları kararlılıkla anlamama, romancılık ise anlama işidir.”

“Le meilleur commencement pour une bonne amitié, c'est un secret.”

“‎The past is always an invented land.”

“Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”

“In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.”

“She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.”

“When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one," I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. "Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest , most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them." (p.191)”

“İnsan hayatta değilken bile paranın önemini biliyor.”

“What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force.”

“The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.”

“Conrad,Nabokov, Naipaul - these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination however, requires that I stay in the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.”

“Possono succedere tante cose nella vita, eppure si perde tempo ad aspettare.”

“Forse siamo arrivati al cuore della nostra storia. Quanto è possibile capire il dolore, l’amore di un altro? Fino a che punto possiamo capire coloro che vivono tra dolori, frustrazioni e angosce più profonde delle nostre? Se capire significa mettersi al posto di colui che è diverso da noi, i ricchi e i dominatori del mondo hanno mai potuto capire milioni di miseri emarginati? Fino a che punto il romanziere Orhan può scorgere il buio nella vita difficile e dolorosa del suo amico poeta?”

“Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?”

“Now everyone is prouder and poorer”

“As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take it's first solo walk outside the body.”

“- Za nas je otkucaj sata, baš kao žuvor šadrvana u dvorištu džamije, odjek zakoračenja u ono što je u nama, a ne zvuk percepcije onoga što je oko nas.”

“- Nasmej mi se. Nasmej mi se pa da na tvom licu, barem jednom ugledam svetlost onog sveta. Podseti me na toplinu pekare u koju sam, vraćajući se iz škole sa tašnom u ruci po snežnom zimskom danu, ulazila da kupim zemičku; podseti me kako sam po vrelom letnjem danu sa keja radosno skakala u more; podseti me na prvi poljubac, na prvi zagrljaj, na orah do čijeg sam se samog vrha popela sama, na letnje veče u kojem sam bila van sebe, na noć u kojoj sam se veselo napila, na ušuškanost u mom jorganu i na lepo dete koje me je sa ljubavlju pogledalo. Sve je to u onoj zemlji, i ja želim tamo da odem, pomozi mi, pomozi mi da bih mogla srećna da prihvatim to da me je sve manje svaki put kad udahnem.”

“Počinjao sam i sebe da doživljavam kao satkanog od one svetlosti koja je navirala iz knjige. I to me je smirivalo.”

“Drveće ne zna da je drveće.”

“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”

“When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you'll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favourite promontories”

“When you look into the faces of these quiet creatures who don't know how to tell stories--who are mute, who can't make themselves heard, who fade into the woodwork, who only think of the perfect answer after the fact, after they're back at home, who can never think of a story that anyone else will find interesting--is there not more depth and more meaning in them? You can see every letter of every untold story swimming on their faces, and all the signs of silence, dejection, and even defeat. You can even imagine your own face in those faces, can't you?”

“How different from the cosy world of Rüya's detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.”

“Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.”

“Ist nicht eigentliches Ziel von Roman und Museum, unsere Erinnerungen so aufrichtig wie möglich zu erzählen und dadurch unser Glück in das Glück anderer zu verwandeln?”

“We had no desire to live in Istanbul, nor in Paris or New York. Let them have their discos and dollars, their skycrapers and supersonics transports. Let them have their radios and their color TV, hey, we have ours, don't we? But we have something they don't have. Heart. We have heart. Look, look how the light of life seeps into my very heart”

“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, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.”

“The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.”

“Das echte Liebesleid nistet sich an der Basis unserer Existenz ein, erwischt uns unerbittlich an unserem schwächsten Punkt, greift von da auf alles andere über und verteilt sich unaufhaltsam über unseren ganzen Körper und unser ganzes Leben. Wenn wir unglücklich verliebt sind, dienen unsere sämtlichen Leiden und Sorgen, vom Tod des Vaters bis hin zum banalsten Missgeschick, wie zum Beispiel einem verlegten Schlüssel, als neuerlicher Auslöser für den Urschmerz, der stets bereit ist, wieder anzuschwellen. Wessen Leben durch die Liebe auf den Kopf gestellt wird, so wie meines, der meint immer, zusammen mit dem Liebesleid würden auch alle anderen Sorgen ein Ende finden, und so rührt er unwillkürlich immer wieder an der Wunde in sich drinnen.”