“Ideas are no one's monopoly - Dhirubhai Ambani”

“I am willing to salaam anyone. One thing you won't find in me and that is ego. - Dhirubhai Ambani”

“If there is one thing will kill Turkey,’ she would say, ‘it is a famine of ideas.’No one in her coterie dared mention that if anything was killing Turkey it was a surfeit of ideas, too many political visions and ideologies. But the head of the school of economics did mention a particularly bright and aggressive undergraduate who was fighting a ridiculous but valorous battle against an American academic of ten times his experience and a hundred times his reputation. Three days later the invitation arrived on Georgios Ferentinou’s desk. Not even his unworldliness could ignore a summons from Meryem Nasi. So he found himself stiff as a wire in a hired suit and cheap shoes clutching a glass on her Yeniköy terrace, grimacing nervously at anyone who moved through his personal space.”

“We know that those things to which we have an emotional connection stick with us better than those for which we have none. Dramatization is a way to get your intellectual ideas across to your audience emotionally.”

“We love the idea of transformation, so we can make ourselves something more than just ordinary. It's why you're doing this, isn't it?" she asked. "You don't want to settle for what you are; you want to be more. You want to win.”

“A joyful task,’ he says and she realizes that he welcomes the idea of years of searching, tile by tile, inscription by inscription, cornice by cornice and niche by niche, that the painstaking search of Sinan’s greatest achievement, decades long, is the holy task; that the secret letter is cut in every stone and tile. By the time you find it, you have realized the supreme unimportance of finding it. A Sufi lesson.”

“I don't ever think about death. Not really, no more than a flicker of anxiety when I'm trying to merge on the highway or watching a news clip about some unfortunate girl my age. Even then, those are vague, passing ideas - not forty feet away with razor-sharp claws and angry teeth. But standing here, shaking with fear, I suddenly grasp the truth of it: the blood racing in my veins, the sharp tingle of my chilled skin, the intensity of every breath. This is my life.”