617 Quotes by Orhan Pamuk

I told him just so he wouldn’t be fooled by the bright lights of Istanbul into thinking that life was somehow easy.

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

Nothing makes you happy in life except love... Neither the books you write or cites you see... I am very lonely... If I say that I want to be here in this city close to you until the end of my life would you believe me?

At times like this what matters is not our words but our demeanor, not the magnitude or elegance of our grief but the degree to which we can express fellowship with those around us. I sometimes think that our love of cigarettes owes nothing to the nicotine, and everything to their ability to fill the meaningless void and offer an easy way of feeling as if we are doing something purposeful.

When there is no one to observe us, the other self we keep hidden inside can come out and do as it pleases. But when you have a father near enough to keep an eye on you, that second self remains buried within.

In order to find meaning and readerly pleasure in the universe the writer reveals to us, we feel we must search for the novel’s secret center, and we therefore try to embed every detail of the novel in our memory, as if learning each leaf of a tree by heart.

There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes.

At that moment, I wished my whole consciousness could be erased. I wanted to escape from my own awareness, to wander freely in a world outside my mind, but understanding now that I would always be two people, I realized that I’d never be able to let go.

They were able to deduce from his reports that the sharbat was poisonous to Turks but not to Kurds; however, because of the official state position that Kurds and Turks are indistinguishable, they kept this conclusion to themselves.