A Strangeness in My Mind

In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.

But I think it must be easier for a girl to marry someone she doesn’t know, because the more you get to know men, the harder it is to love them.

WHAT MAKES CITY LIFE MEANINGFUL IS THE THINGS WE HIDE.

But just like believing in God, falling in love is such a sacred feeling that it leaves you with no room for any other passions.

The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep

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.

The city’s more beautiful at night, you know: the people of the night always tell the truth.

A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor

But despair is what keeps love alive.

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.

All the happiness and beauty that life had to offer only revealed themselves when his mind drifted off into fantasies of a world far removed from his own.

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

Where there’s a lot of money to be made, there’s also a lot of blood to be spilled.

big proclamations about honor are really just excuses invented to let people kill each other with a clear conscience.

The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.

in this night, pure and everlasting, like an old fairy tale, being Turkish felt infinitely better than being poor.

The future of a society was not determined by the traits its members shared but rested entirely on their differences

people who make fun of everything can never truly fall in love, nor truly believe in God.

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

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

With astonishing consistency, the people of Kültepe and Duttepe all saw the same figures in their dreams at regular intervals: Boys: the female primary-school teacher Girls: Atatürk Men: the Holy Prophet Muhammad Women: a tall, anonymous Western film star Old men: an angel drinking milk Old women: a young postman bringing good news

Mevlut cinselliğin ancak beklemekle, beklemekle gerçekleşecek bir mucize olduğunu on beş yaşında böyle anladı

Boo-zaa,” he cried when he was back out on the street. As he walked toward the Golden Horn, down a road that felt as if it were descending into oblivion, he remembered the view he’d seen from Süleyman’s apartment. Now he knew what it was that he wanted to tell Istanbul and write on its walls. It was both his public and his private view; it was what his heart intended as much as what his words had always meant to say. He said it to himself: “I have loved Rayiha more than anything in this world.

Walking fueled his imagination and reminded him that there was another realm within our world, hidden away behind the walls of a mosque, in a collapsing wooden mansion, or inside a cemetery.

Thoughts ramble through my head like nervous burglars in a pitch-black house.

in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes