“Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead. we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something...I don't know...even an earring”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take it's first solo walk outside the body.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one," I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. "Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest , most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them." (p.191)”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“What is love?”
“I don’t know.”
“Love is the name given to the bond Kemal feels with Füsun whenever they travel along highways or sidewalks; visit houses, gardens, or rooms; or whenever he watches her sitting in tea gardens and restaurants, and at dinner tables.”
“Hmmm … that’s a lovely answer,~ But isn’t love what you feel when you can’t see me?”
“Under those circumstances, it becomes a terrible obsession, an illness.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that's all. (Taking immediate possession is not necessary.)”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“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.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“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.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“It's important, no doubt, to understand the person we love. If we cannot manage this, it's necessary, at least, to believe we understand them. I must confess that over the entire eight years I only rarely enjoyed the contentment of the second possibility, let alone the first.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“En realidad nadie sabe que está viviendo el momento más feliz de su vida mientras lo vive.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Herkes bilsin, çok mutlu bir hayat yaşadım.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape as in a novel we can identify our happiest moment selecting it in retrospective”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory--of this there is no doubt.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk
Born place: in Istanbul, Turkey
Born date June 7, 1952
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“The Void is not being, but not being cannot be, ergo the Void cannot be. The reasoning was sound, because it denied the Void while granting that it could be conceived. In fact, we can quite easily conceive things that do not exist. Can a chimera, buzzing in the Void, devour second intentions? No, because chimeras do not exist, in the Void no buzzing can be heard, and intentions are mental things -- an intended pear does not nourish us. And yet I can think of a chimera even if it is chimerical, namely, if it is not. And the same with the Void.”
― Umberto Eco, quote from The Island of the Day Before
“Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Some one had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passageway around under the grandstand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on the cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the coral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from In Our Time
“Royce saw to his horse’s needs; then, finding a suitable place, he unrolled his blanket and lay down.
“I take it we’re camping here, then?”
Royce said nothing, still refusing to acknowledge his existence.
“You could have said, ‘We’re going to bed down here for the rest of the night.’ No, wait, you’re right, too much. How about ‘sleeping here’? Two words. Even you could manage that, right? I mean, I know you can talk. You had plenty to say back in Arcadius’s office. Couldn’t keep the words from coming out then, but no, utterly impossible to indicate in any way that we’ll be stopping here for the night.”
Hadrian dismounted and began unloading Dancer. “How long were we on the road?” He paused to look up at the moon. “What? Five, six hours? Not a damn word. Getting chilly out, don’t you think, Hadrian? Moon looks like a fingernail, ain’t that right, Hadrian? That tree looks like a goddamn bear, don’t it, Hadrian? Nothing. By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, I was attacked by a goshawk and a pig-riding dwarf that shot eggs at me with a sling. I was knocked from my horse and wrestled with the dwarf, the hawk, and the pig for what had to be half an hour. The dwarf kept smashing eggs in my face, and that ruddy pig pinned me down, licking them off. I only got away because the dwarf ran out of eggs. Then the hawk turned into a moth that became distracted by the light of the moon.”
Royce shifted to his side, hood up.
“Yeah, well … thank Maribor and Novron I didn’t need your help that time.”
“Didn’t care for my help too much in the stable,” Royce said.
“It speaks!”
― Michael J. Sullivan, quote from The Crown Tower
“...in those days children were rather out of fashion.”
― Anthony Powell, quote from A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
“them till the very last moment, and then what did I do but protect the family from”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
Sweetness in the Bel...
The General Theory o...
Goldfinger
In Praise of Love
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