Quotes from Orhan Pamuk

What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.

It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.

A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor

But despair is what keeps love alive.

For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all ?stanbullus) making it my own.

los colores no pueden comprenderse, se sienten.

This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.

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 .

In a city where men are killing each other like animals just to make it a happier place, who has the right to stop me from killing myself?

Only vulgar people boast about how happy they are

A person could wish for one thing and speak of another, and their fate, their kismet, was the thing that could bring the two together.

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

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.

Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.

To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form of a love who has left never to return: It is to grieve, dear reader, it is to weep.

Love is the ability to make the invisible visible and the desire always to feel the invisible in one's midst.

You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over, but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how complex or difficult, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life as well.

He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself.

To know is to remember that you've seen.To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness.

The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil's ruse.

Ä°nsan hepsini ayn? anda düÅŸünemiyor ama görebiliyordu. Akl?mdaki kelimelerin, akl?mdaki hayallere yetiÅŸememesi gibi bir ÅŸeydi bu. Kelimeler duygular?ma yetiÅŸemiyor ve yetersiz kal?yorlard?.

El color es el tacto del ojo, la música de los sordos, una palabra en la oscuridad.

Estoy sufriendo las penas del infierno sin ni siquiera haber muerto.

man's sentimental attachment to objects is one of life's greatest consolations.