617 Quotes by Orhan Pamuk

"I thought: I am most completely myself when nobody’s watching. I had only just begun to discover this truth. 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."

"Because, as I would always tell myself so many years later, lying here in my bed: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so, Fatma?"

"Babasız büyürsen âlemin bir merkezi ve sınırı olduğunu anlamaz, her şeyi yapabileceğini sanırsın...ama bir süre sonra ne yapacağını bilmez, dünyada bir mana, bir merkez bulmaya çalışır, sana hayır diyecek birini aramaya başlarsın."

"I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning."

"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."

"What we learned from these painstakingly detailed miniatures was how ephemeral all those ancient lives had been, how quickly they’d all been forgotten, and how vain we were to think that we could grasp the meaning of life and history by learning a handful of facts."

"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."

"Pour elle, aimer, c'était prendre tous les risques et donner notre vie pour quelqu'un, oui, l'amour était une chose de cet ordre. Mais dans la vie, cela ne se produisait qu'une seule fois."

"The tree is bent when it is young"

"The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game."