Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Was religion an empowering force for women who otherwise had limited power in a society designed for and by men, or was it yet another tool for facilitating their submission?”

— Elif Shafak

152. “Not a very sensible thing to do, I admit, to fall for someone who is not of your kind, someone who will only complicate your life, disrupt your routine and mess with your sense of stability and rootedness. But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.”

— Elif Shafak

153. “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

154. “No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within.”

— Elif Shafak

155. “Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.”

— Elif Shafak

156. “We’re all what we are. And we’re all subject to change. It is a journey from here to there.”

— Elif Shafak

157. “The past is a whirlpool. If you let it dominate your present moment, it will suck you in,” said Shams as if he had read my thoughts. “Time is just an illusion. What you need is to live this very moment. That is all that matters.”

— Elif Shafak

158. “I cannot prevent people from destroying. All I can do is keep building.”

— Elif Shafak

159. “Loneliness was an inseparable part of being human.”

— Elif Shafak

160. “Life often felt unjust, but death was the biggest injustice.”

— Elif Shafak

161. “In many ways the twenty-first century is not that different from the thirteenth century. Both will be recorded in history as times of unprecedented religious clashes, cultural misunderstandings, and a general sense of insecurity and fear of the Other. At times like these, the need for love is greater than ever.”

— Elif Shafak

162. “People let their thoughts run amok when they came across things over which they had little control, as if by inventing stories they could make sense of all that was painfully confusing, including their brief stay in this world.”

— Elif Shafak

163. “But it wasn’t enough. Whatever I did, I could not rid my mind of the thought that he didn’t love me. I had no doubt that he liked me and meant me well. But this wasn’t anything even close to love. So harrowing was this thought that it was eating me up inside, gnawing at my body and soul.”

— Elif Shafak

164. “Where do you start someone’s story when life has more then one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is death exactly an end.”

— Elif Shafak

165. “Sooner or later we were destined to meet. And when we did, I would learn why his kind hazel eyes were eternally sad and how I came to be murdered on an early-spring night.”

— Elif Shafak

166. “Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.”

— Elif Shafak

167. “Destiny does not mean that your life has been strictly predetermined. Therefore, to leave everything to fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe is a sign of sheer ignorance. The music of the universe is all-pervading and it is composed on... different levels. Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well you play is entirely in your hands.”

— Elif Shafak

168. “Knowledge requires reading. Books. In-depth analyses. Investigative journalism. Then there is wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy. For that we need stories and storytelling.”

— Elif Shafak

169. “Mourning is like virginity. You should give it to the one who deserves it most.”

— Elif Shafak

170. “On the Sufi path, first you discover the art of being alone amid the crowd. Next you discover the crowd within your solitude – the voices inside you.”

— Elif Shafak

171. “Life is about perfection. Every incident that happens, no matter how colossal or small, and every hardship that we endure is an aspect of a divine plan that works to that end. Struggle is intrinsic to being human. That is why it says in the Qur’an, Certainly we will show Our ways to those who struggle on Our way. There is no such thing as coincidence in God’s scheme.”

— Elif Shafak

172. “Books change us. Books save us. I know this because it happened to me.”

— Elif Shafak

173. “You don’t share a language, you think, and then you realise, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.”

— Elif Shafak

174. “Stones stay still. A learner, never.”

— Elif Shafak

175. “If wanting to be heard is one side of the coin, the other side is being willing to listen. The two are inextricably connected. When convinced that no one – especially those in places of power and privilege – is really paying attention to our protests and demands we will be less inclined to listen to others, particularly to people whose views differ from ours.”

— Elif Shafak

176. “There’s no such thing as a small god. Once somebody starts playing God, sooner or later, things will get out of hand.”

— Elif Shafak

177. “Some cities you go to because you want to; some cities you go to because they want you to.”

— Elif Shafak

178. “The dervish calmly responded, “Yes, but I know myself, and believe me, it would have been much worse if it were the other way round.” As long as I knew myself, I would be all right. Whosoever knows himself, knows the One.”

— Elif Shafak

179. “She had always known that they did not connect on any deep level, but connecting emotionally need not be a priority on a married couple’s list, she thought, especially for a man and a woman who had been married for so long. There were more important things than passion and love in a marriage, such as understanding, affection, compassion, and that most godlike act a person could perform, forgiveness. Love was secondary to any of these.”

— Elif Shafak

180. “His honesty offended others, but he liked to provoke people to see what came out of them in moments of anger.”

— Elif Shafak

181. “What we need is sincere self-examination. Not being on the watch for the fault of others.”

— Elif Shafak

182. “When I met you, Peri, I thought this girl doesn’t know it but she carries the three passion of Bertrand Russel: the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable compassion for the suffering of mankind.”

— Elif Shafak

183. “Painfully delicate and surprisingly strong, silk resembles love.”

— Elif Shafak

184. “How women could be expected to keep their heads down and simultaneously have their eyes open in all directions was beyond Peri.”

— Elif Shafak

185. “I like to borrow a metaphor from the great poet and mystic Rumi who talks about living like a drawing compass. One leg of the compass is static. It is fixed and rooted in a certain spot. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a huge wide circle around the first one, constantly moving. Just like that, one part of my writing is based in Istanbul. It has strong local roots. Yet at the same time the other part travels the whole wide world, feeling connected to several cities, cultures, and peoples.”

— Elif Shafak

186. “Choice and confusion were conjoined twins.”

— Elif Shafak

187. “A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference.”

— Elif Shafak

188. “By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans.”

— Elif Shafak

189. “In resistance lies the key to life.”

— Elif Shafak

190. “Perhaps in a world bound with rules and regulations that made little sense, and usually privileged a few over the many, madness was the only true freedom.”

— Elif Shafak

191. “Yeah, we should all line up along the Bosphorus Bridge and puff as hard as we can to shove this city in the direction of the West. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try the other way, see if we can veer to the East. It’s no good to be in between. International politics does not appreciate ambiguity.”

— Elif Shafak

192. “People who have much to say, a distinctive story to tell, often do not do so because they fear their words will fall on deaf ears. They feel excluded from political power and, to a large extent, from political and civic participation. Even if they were to shout their grievances from the rooftops of Westminster – or Brussels or Washington or New Delhi – they doubt it would have the slightest impact on public policy.”

— Elif Shafak

193. “Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven as they are both present inside this very moment. Why worry so much about the aftermath, an imaginary future, when this very moment is the only time we can truly and fully experience the presence and absence of God in our lives? Motivated by neither the fear of punishment nor the desire to be rewarded in heaven, Sufis love God simply because they love him.”

— Elif Shafak

194. “When you first became a father, you assumed your child was an extension of yourself. He gave you pride, and a sense of achievement and rootedness, until you came to realize, little by little, that a child was a being of his own making. He would keep to his own destiny, no matter how much you wished, prompted or forced him to follow in your footsteps.”

— Elif Shafak

195. “In everything we do, it is our hearts that make the difference, not our outer appearances... keep both eyes closed and instead open a third eye – the eye that sees the inner realm.”

— Elif Shafak

196. “Believe in your values and your rules, but never lord them over others... Learn the Truth, my friend, but be careful not to make a fetish out of your truths.”

— Elif Shafak

197. “In badly fractured societies that have lost their appreciation of diversity and their regard for pluralism, opponents will be seen as enemies, politics will become replete with marital metaphors and anyone who thinks and speaks differently will be labeled as a ‘traitor’.”

— Elif Shafak

198. “Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.” I nodded. I didn’t need to ask in order to understand that this, too, was one of the rules.”

— Elif Shafak

199. “It’s odd how faces, solid and visible as they are, evaporate, while words, made of breath, stay.”

— Elif Shafak

200. “Instead of an outer-oriented jihad – defined as “the war against infidels” and carried out by many in those days just as in the present – Rumi stood up for an inner-oriented jihad where the aim was to struggle against and ultimately prevail over one’s ego, nafs.”

— Elif Shafak