Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 8

51. “Many analysts compare Turkey with countries in the Middle East, but I think we need to compare it with Russia. Both countries come from a tradition of empire, and also from a tradition of the strong state.”

— Elif Shafak

52. “Turkey has a very young, dynamic, curious population. In Europe, Facebook and Twitter are mostly about sharing daily experiences while for Turkish people, social networks are political platforms.”

— Elif Shafak

53. “That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.”

— Elif Shafak

54. “Almost half of the Turkish population believes it is not legitimate to criticize the government. Interestingly, this correlates with the number of supporters of Erdogan’s government.”

— Elif Shafak

55. “Feminists are now being vilified in politics, erdogan used to speak more embracingly, saying he was the leader of everyone, whether they voted for him or not. He sounds as if he puts a distance between himself and half the nation.”

— Elif Shafak

56. “Stories bring us together, untold stories keep us apart.”

— Elif Shafak

57. “What was love if it wasn’t nursing someone else’s pain as if it were your own?”

— Elif Shafak

58. “Arriving there is what you are destined for, But do not hurry the journey at all.”

— Elif Shafak

59. “Mothers don’t go to heaven when they die. They get special permission from God to stay around a bit longer and watch over their children, no matter what has passed between them in their brief mortal lives.”

— Elif Shafak

60. “Acts of barbarity can happen fast and on a large scale not when more people turn immoral or evil, not necessarily, but when enough people become numb. When we are indifferent, disconnected, atomised. Too busy with our own lives to care about others. Uninterested in and unmoved by someone else’s pain. That is the most dangerous emotion – the lack of emotion.”

— Elif Shafak

61. “The places where we were born are the shape of our lives, even when we are away from them.”

— Elif Shafak

62. “While some people were passionate believers and others passionate non-believers, she would always remain stuck in between.”

— Elif Shafak

63. “As far as she was concerned, the apocalypse was not the worst thing that could happen. The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought, was terrifying.”

— Elif Shafak

64. “Love cannot be explained. It can only be experienced. Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.”

— Elif Shafak

65. “First-generation immigrants... Both eternally grateful for the chances life has given them and scarred by what it has snatched away, always out of place, separated from others by some unspoken experience, like survivors of a car accident.”

— Elif Shafak

66. “Arboreal-time is cyclical, recurrent, perennial; the past and the future breathe within this moment, and the present does not necessarily flow in one direction; instead it draws circles within circles, like the rings you find when you cut us down.”

— Elif Shafak

67. “The world is unfair, said Meryem. “If a stone falls on an egg, it is bad for the egg; if an egg falls on a stone, it is still bad for the egg.”

— Elif Shafak

68. “For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away. Her jaw dropped as she realized this was the.”

— Elif Shafak

69. “We live in an age in which there is too much information, less knowledge and even less wisdom. That ratio needs to be reversed. We definitely need less information, more knowledge, and much more wisdom.”

— Elif Shafak

70. “If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations.”

— Elif Shafak

71. “Trees might not have eyes but we have vision. I respond to light. I detect ultraviolet and infrared and electromagnetic waves. If.”

— Elif Shafak

72. “Sometimes, absence is actually a bond and distance can help you to look closer.”

— Elif Shafak

73. “It was an ordinary spring day in Istanbul, a long and leaden afternoon like so many others, when she discovered, with a hollowness in her stomach, that she was capable of killing someone.”

— Elif Shafak

74. “May you never be able to forget. May you go to your grave still remembering.”

— Elif Shafak

75. “She liked fuchsia better – a colour with personality.”

— Elif Shafak

76. “I’ve been thinking that you are my country. Is that a strange thing to say? Without you, I don’t have a home in this world; I am a felled tree, my roots severed all round; you can topple me with the touch of a finger.”

— Elif Shafak

77. “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.”

— Elif Shafak

78. “She had so much love to give and yet no one demanding it.”

— Elif Shafak

79. “There’s something about love that resembles faith. It’s kind of a blind trust, isn’t it? The sweetest euphoria. The magic of connecting with a being beyond our limited, familiar selves. But if we get carried away by love- or by faith- it turns into a dogma, a fixation. The sweetness becomes sour. We suffer in the hands of gods that we ourselves created.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

81. “At the end of the day, we all remember for the same reason we try to forget: to survive in a world that neither understands nor values us.”

— Elif Shafak

82. “Love is the bold affirmation of hope. You don’t embrace hope when death and destruction are in command. You don’t put on your best dress and tuck a flower in your hair when you are surrounded by ruins and shards. You don’t lose your heart at a time when hearts are supposed to remain sealed, especially for those who are not of your religion, not of your language, not of your blood. You don’t fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them.”

— Elif Shafak

83. “Wherever there is a war and painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise.”

— Elif Shafak

84. “Choice and confusion were conjoined twins.”

— Elif Shafak

85. “He always had an excuse – if a cat wants to eat her kittens, she’ll say they look like mice.”

— Elif Shafak

86. “Let love take hold of you and change you. At first through its presence then through its absence.”

— Elif Shafak

87. “We are scared of happiness, you see. From a tender age we have been taught that in the air, in the Etesian wind, an uncanny exchange is at work, so that for every morsel of contentment there will follow a morsel of suffering, for every peal of laughter there is a drop of tear ready to roll, because that is the way of this strange world, and hence we try not to look too happy, even on days when we might feel so inside.”

— Elif Shafak

88. “Instead of intrusion or passivity, may I suggest submission? Some people make the mistake of confusing “submission” with “weakness,” whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.”

— Elif Shafak

89. “Certainty was to curiosity what the sun was to the wings of Icarus. Where one shone forcefully, the other couldn’t survive. With certainty came arrogance; with arrogance, blindness; with blindness, darkness; and with darkness, more certainty.”

— Elif Shafak

90. “The faces we see in the mirrors are not really ours. Just reflections. We can find our true selves only in the faces of the Other... We strive for the opposite: to multiple everyone into a hundred belongings, a thousand beating hearts. If I am a human, I should be big enough to feel for people everywhere.”

— Elif Shafak

91. “Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror.”

— Elif Shafak

92. “May love find you when you least expect, where you least expect.”

— Elif Shafak

93. “People always told her to fight depression. But I have a feeling that as soon as we see something as our enemy we make it stronger. Like a boomerang. You hurl it away, it comes back and hits you with equal force.”

— Elif Shafak

94. “I’m perpetually in a limbo. Maybe I want too many things at once and nothing passionately enough.”

— Elif Shafak

95. “Love can only be perfected in pain.”

— Elif Shafak

96. “They say there is a thin line between losing yourself in God and losing your mind.”

— Elif Shafak

97. “Because love is the very essence and purpose of life. As Rumi reminds us, it hits everybody, including those who shun love – even those who use the word “romantic” as a sign of disapproval.”

— Elif Shafak

98. “No wonder the Prophet Muhammad said, “In this world take pity on three kinds of people. The rich man who has lost his fortune, the well-respected man who has lost his respectability, and the wise man who is surrounded by ignorants.”

— Elif Shafak

99. “There is only one way to be born into a new life: to die before death.”

— Elif Shafak

100. “Wisdom consists of ten parts: nine parts of silence, one part of words.”

— Elif Shafak