Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

53. “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

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. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

58. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

65. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— 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. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

82. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

84. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

86. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

94. “For apprentices everywhere – no one told us that love was the hardest craft to master.”

— Elif Shafak

95. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

97. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

100. “Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you, her heart countered. Sometimes where you feel most safe is where you least belong.”

— Elif Shafak