Quotes from Orhan Pamuk

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

when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape as in a novel we can identify our happiest moment selecting it in retrospective

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

You'll learn it all soon enough . . . You will see everything without being seen. You will hear everything but pretend that you haven't . . . You will walk for ten hours a day but feel like you haven't walked at all.

If we love someone very much, we know that even if we give him the most valuable thing we have, we know not to expect harm from him. This is what a sacrifice is.

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently?

For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.

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?

at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.

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.

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

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'm a dog, and because you humans are much less rational beasts than I, you're telling yourselves, 'Dogs don't talk.' Nethertheless, you seem to believe a story in which corpses speak and characters use words they couldn't possibly know. Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

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.

In actuality, we don't look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is preciously what they cannot depict. That's why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life.

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory — of this there is no doubt.

The past is always an invented land.

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it.

Love is a sacred silence.

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.

Now everyone is prouder and poorer

Love is the urgency to hold fast to another and to be together in the same place. It's the desire to keep the world out by embracing another. It is the yearning to find a safe harbor for the human soul.

Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life.