The Architect's Apprentice

Some cities you go to because you want to; some cities you go to because they want you to.

Sometimes, for the soul to thrive, the heart needs to be broken, son.

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

It's odd how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate, while words, made of breath, stay.

For apprentices everywhere - no one told us that love was the hardest craft to master

Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one's faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back.

Working is prayer for the likes of us,” his master often said. “It’s the way we commune with God.” “Then how does He respond to us?” Jahan had once asked, way back when he was younger. “By giving us more work, of course.

In order to gain mastery, you need to dismantle as much as you put together.' 'Then there'd be no buildings left in the world,' Jahan ventured. 'Everything would be razed to the ground.' 'We are not destroying the buildings, son. We are destroying our desire to possess them. Only God is the owner. Of the stone and of the skill.

Of three things in this life she expected no good: a man who had sold his soul to Sheitan; a woman proud of her beauty; and the news that could not wait till the morning to be delivered.

I cannot prevent people from destroying. All I can do is keep building.

Busbecq believed there were two blessings in life: books and friends. And that they should be possessed in inverse quantities: many books, but only a handful of friends.

Only remember that cities, too, are like human beings. They are not made of stones and wood, solely. They are of flesh and bone. They bleed when they are hurt. Every unlawful construction is a nail hammered into the heart of the Instambul. Remember to pity a wounded city the way you pity a wounded person".

Resentment is a cage, talent is a captured bird.

If you don't know what to do with an answer, don't ask the question.

It seemed to Jahan that, in truth, this world, too, was a spectacle. One way or another, everyone was parading. They performed their tricks, each of them, some staying longer, others shorter, but in the end they all left through the back door, similarly unfulfilled, similarly in need of applause.

If you carry a sword, you obey the sword, not the other way round. Nobody can hold a weapon and keep their hands clear of blood at the same time.

But Istanbul is a city of easy forgettings. Things are written in water over there, except the works of my master, which are written in stone.

The four borders of the Taj Mahal are designed to be identical, as if there were a mirror situated on one side, though one can never tell on which one. Stone reflected in the water. God reflected in human beings. Love reflected in heartbreak. Truth reflected in stories. We live, toil and die under the same invisible dome. Rich and poor, Mohammedan and baptized, free and slave, man and woman, Sultan and mahout, master and apprentice … I have come to believe that if there is one shape that reaches out to all of us, it is the dome. That is where all the distinctions disappear and every single sound, whether of joy or sorrow, merges into one huge silence of all-encompassing love. When I think of this world in such a way, I feel dazed and disoriented, and cannot tell any longer where the future begins and the past ends; where the West falls and the East rises.

What difference did it make whether they were hurt or happy, right or wrong, when the sun rose and the moon waned just the same, with or without them?

At one glance I loved you with a thousand hearts  . . . Let the zealots think loving is sinful Never mind, Let me burn in the hellfire of that sin. – Mihri Hatun, sixteenth-century Ottoman poetess