“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
“The first thing the boy Garion remembered was the kitchen at Faldor's farm. For all the rest of his life he had a special warm feeling for kitchens and those peculiar sounds and smells that seemed somehow to combine into a bustling seriousness that had to do with love and food and comfort and security and, above all, home. No matter how high Garion rose in life, he never forgot that all his memories began in that kitchen.”
― David Eddings, quote from Pawn of Prophecy
“Dad also has the loudest, stinkiest farts in creation. I don’t know how he manages to control them at work, or even if he does, but when he’d get home, he’d let them loose. They’d start as he walked up the stairs. Step, fart. Step, fart. Step, fart.”
― Sharon M. Draper, quote from Out of My Mind
“Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies.
The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, quote from Rant
“There is a plain under a dim sky. It is covered with gentle rolling curves that might remind you of something else if you saw it from a long way away, and if you did see it from a long way away you'd be very glad that you were, in fact, a long way away.
Three gray figures floated just above it. Exactly what they were can't be described in normal language. Some people might call them cherubs, although there was nothing rosy-cheeked about them. They might be rumored among those who see to it that gravity operates and that time stays separate from space. Call them auditors. Auditors of reality.
They were in conversation without speaking. They didn't need to speak. They just changed reality so that they had spoken.
One said, It has never happened before. Can it be done?
One said, It will have to be done. There is a personality. Personalities come to an end. Only forces endure.
It said this with satisfaction.
One said, Besides... there have been irregularities. Where you get personality, you get irregularities. Well-known fact.
One said, He has worked inefficiently?
One said, No. We can't get him there.
One said, That is the point. The word is him. Becoming a personality is inefficient. We don't want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people?
One said, Got a crush on them, that sort of thing?
One said, in a voice that would have been even chillier if it was not already at absolute zero, No.
One said, Sorry. Just my little joke.
One said, Besides, sometimes he wonders about his job. Such speculation is dangerous.
One said, No argument there.
One said, Then we are agreed?
One, who seemed to have been thinking about something, said, Just one moment. Did you not just use the singular pronoun "my?" Not developing a personality, are you?
One said, guiltily, Who? Us?
One said, Where there is personality, there is discord.
One said, Yes. Yes. Very true.
One said, All right. But watch it in future.
One said, Then we are agreed?
They looked up at the face of Azrael, outlined against the sky. In fact, it was the sky.
Azrael nodded, slowly.
One said, Very well. Where is this place?
One said, It is the Discworld. It rides through space on the back of a giant turtle.
One said, Oh, one of that sort. I hate them.
One said, You're doing it again. You said "I."
One said, No! No! I didn't! I never said "I!"... oh, bugger...
It burst into flame and burned in the same way that a small cloud of vapor burns, quickly and with no residual mess. Almost immediately, another one appeared. It was identical in appearance to its vanished sibling.
One said, Let that be a lesson. To become a personality is to end. And now... let us go.”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Reaper Man
“Hello? This is Clary Fairchild.”
“Clary? It’s me, Emma.”
“Oh, Emma, hi! I haven’t heard from you in ages. My mom says thanks for the wedding flowers, by the way. She wanted to send a note but Luke whisked her away on a honeymoon to Tahiti.”
“Tahiti sounds nice.”
“It probably is — Jace, what are you doing with that thing? There is no way it’ll fit.”
“Is this a bad time?”
“What? No! Jace is trying to drag a trebuchet into the training room. Alec, stop helping him.”
“What’s a trebuchet?”
“It’s a huge catapult.”
“What are they going to use it for?”
“I have no idea. Alec, you’re enabling! You’re an enabler!”
“Maybe it is a bad time.”
“I doubt there’ll be a better one. Is something wrong? Is there anything I can do?”
“I think we have your cat.”
“What?”
“Your cat. Big fuzzy Blue Persian? Always looks angry? Julian says it’s your cat. He says he saw it at the New York Institute. Well, saw him. It’s a boy cat.”
“Church? You have Church? But I thought — well, we knew he was gone. We thought Brother Zachariah took him. Isabelle was annoyed, but they seemed to know each other. I’ve never seen Church actually likeanyone like that.”
“I don’t know if he likes anyone here. He bit Julian twice. Oh, wait. Julian says he likes Ty. He’s asleep on Ty’s bed.”
“How did you wind up with him?”
“Someone rang our front doorbell. Diana, she’s our tutor, went down to see what it was. Church was in a cage on the front step with a note tied to it. It said For Emma. This is Church, a longtime friend of the Carstairs. Take care of this cat and he will take care of you. —J.”
“Brother Zachariah left you a cat.”
“But I don’t even really know him. And he’s not a Silent Brother any more.”
“You may not know him, but he clearly knows you.”
“What do you think the J stands for?”
“His real name. Look, Emma, if he wants you to have Church, and you want Church, you should keep him.”
“Are you sure? The Lightwoods —“
‘They’re both standing here nodding. Well, Alec is partially trapped under a trebuchet, but he seems to be nodding.”
“Jules says we’d like to keep him. We used to have a cat named Oscar, but he died, and, well, Church seems to be good for Ty’s nightmares.”
“Oh, honey. I think, really, he’s Brother Zachariah’s cat. And if he wants you to have him, then you should.”
“Why does Brother Zachariah want to protect me? It’s like he knows me, but I don’t know why he knows me.”
“I don’t exactly know … But I know Tessa. She’s his — well, girlfriend seems not the right word for it. They’ve known each other a long, long time. I have a feeling they’re both watching over you.”
“That’s good. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”
“Emma — oh my God. The trebuchet just crashed through the floor. I have to go. Call me later.”
“But we can keep the cat?”
“You can keep the cat.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from Lady Midnight
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.