Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “May you never be able to forget. May you go to your grave still remembering.”

— Elif Shafak

52. “Our politics is very masculine, very aggressive, and it’s very polarizing. And the pace of this development has increased in recent years. Erdogan is, in my eyes, the most polarizing politician in recent Turkish political history.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

54. “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

55. “Sometimes I feel I have more faith in European ideals than some of my British or French friends. For them, it’s a financial burden. For me, Europe is primarily about values, about fundamental rights, freedom, women’s rights.”

— Elif Shafak

56. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

58. “She was no part of anything. In her unbroken loneliness, she was complete. Never had she felt so exposed, yet si powerful.”

— Elif Shafak

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

62. “If you weep for all the sorrows in this world, in the end you will have no eyes.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

64. “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

65. “Doesn’t God say, I am closer to you than your jugular vein?” I asked. “God is not someplace far up in the sky. He is inside each and every one of us. That is why He never abandons us. How can He abandon Himself?”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

67. “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

68. “My hijab has never got in the way of my independence.”

— Elif Shafak

69. “In the name of religion they are killing God.”

— Elif Shafak

70. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

72. “The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new Self to be born, hardship is necessary.”

— Elif Shafak

73. “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.”

— Elif Shafak

74. “Never be ashamed of your tears. Cry and everyone knows you’re alive.”

— Elif Shafak

75. “Never had it occurred to him that you could deceive the person you held dear. It was his first lesson in the complexity of love.”

— Elif Shafak

76. “If you don’t know what to do with an answer, don’t ask the question.”

— Elif Shafak

77. “If you want to destroy something, be it a blemish, acne or the human soul, all you need to do is surround it with walls.”

— Elif Shafak

78. “If you’re telling me I should accept things as they are... that nations like obedient good wives, should also give up their dreams, their fantasies... then your grasp of international relations – and women for that matter – is weaker than I thought.”

— Elif Shafak

79. “Not every word is fit for every ear.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

96. “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

97. “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

98. “When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.”

— Elif Shafak

99. “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

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

— Elif Shafak