Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Time is a songbird, and just like any other songbird, it can be taken captive.”

— Elif Shafak

153. “But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.”

— Elif Shafak

154. “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

155. “They never failed to recognize a sad woman when they saw one.”

— Elif Shafak

156. “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

157. “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

158. “If only time never came to its senses. If somehow it wouldn’t succeed in walking a straight line. If it would only lurch, behave nonsensically, fall to pieces. And we would watch, and, condemning its actions, would never have to refer to it again.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

160. “Superstitions are the shadows of fears unknown.”

— Elif Shafak

161. “Yet hope is a hazardous chemical capable of triggering a chain reaction in the human soul.”

— Elif Shafak

162. “Listen, canim, I know you might get cross with me for saying this, but remember, good advice is always annoying and bad advice never is. So if what I say irritates you, take it as good advice.”

— Elif Shafak

163. “We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centres but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

165. “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

166. “The person who is openly loved by someone who is admired by so many people is bound to draw the envy, if not the hatred, of others.”

— Elif Shafak

167. “God was a maze without a map, a circle without a centre; the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that never seemed to fit together. If only she could solve this mystery, she could bring meaning to senselessness, reason to madness, order to chaos, and perhaps, too, she could learn to be happy.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except the face of god.”

— Elif Shafak

173. “At night, when the moon shone high above the lemon trees and there was a shiver in the air, of insects invisible to the eye or fairies sent to exile, Kostas would sometimes catch his mother staring at him with a pained expression.”

— Elif Shafak

174. “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

175. “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.”

— Elif Shafak

176. “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

177. “Maybe we give other names to grief because we are too scared to call it by its name.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

179. “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

180. “Johnny Cash and existential philosophy, they both probe the human soul to see what’s inside, and unhappy with their findings, they both leave it open!”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

182. “Why roots were rated so highly compared with branches or leaves, Peri had never understood. Trees had multiple shoots and filaments extending in every direction, under and above the ancient soils of the earth. If even roots refused to stay put, why expect the impossible from human beings?”

— Elif Shafak

183. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

185. “Of three things in this life she expected no good: a man who had sold his soul to Sheitan; a woman proud of her beauty; and the news that could not wait till the morning to be delivered.”

— Elif Shafak

186. “I liked loneliness. I cherished it. I knew people who would go nuts if they were alone for too many hours. It was the opposite with me. I would go nuts if I had to be in the company of other people all the time. I would miss my privacy.”

— Elif Shafak

187. “England has a peculiar way of making foreigners feel exhilaratingly free and depressingly alone.”

— Elif Shafak

188. “It is easy to be thankful when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied.”

— Elif Shafak

189. “She never confronted the death of anything, be it a habit, a phase, or a marriage, even when the end stood right in front of her, plain and inevitable.”

— Elif Shafak

190. “Before leaving the hall for the stage, Rumi recited a poem, “With your grace, grief turns to joy. With your praise, life becomes infinite. Although love is a trouble, it is a joy. Though this wine is full of headaches, still it delights. Though being occupied with love is difficult, how sweet it is to trade hearts with you, oh beloved.”

— Elif Shafak

191. “The silence diffused outwards into the air; spreading and congealing into an ugly and uneven thickness, stagnant like algae forming on a late-summer pond.”

— Elif Shafak

192. “If God was with you all along, why did you rummage around this whole time in search of Him? Because although it is a fact that He cannot be found by seeking, only those who seek can find Him.”

— Elif Shafak

193. “The sharia is like a candle,” said Shams of Tabriz. “It provides us with much valuable light. But let us not forget that a candle helps us to go from one place to another in the dark. If we forget where we are headed and instead concentrate on the candle, what good is it?”

— Elif Shafak

194. “Family stories intermingle in such ways that what happened generations ago can have an impact on seemingly irrelevant developments of the present day. The past is anything but bygone.”

— Elif Shafak

195. “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

196. “Is that what depression is about-the sinking feeling that your connection to God is broken and you are left to float on your own in a liquid black space, like an astronaut who has been cut loose from his spaceship and all that linked him to Earth?”

— Elif Shafak

197. “A fig is not exactly a fruit, you see. It is a synconium – a fascinating structure that hides flowers and seeds in its cavity, with a barely visible opening through which wasps can enter and deposit their pollen. And sometimes, seizing the opportunity, ants, too, crawl through that opening and eat what they can.”

— Elif Shafak

198. “The past is a trunk in the loft, crammed with scraps, some valuable, but many entirely useless. Although I’d prefer to keep it closed, the slight breeze throws it open, and, before I know it, all the contents have flown everywhere. I put them back. One by one. The memories, the bad and the good. Yet the trunk always snaps open again when I least expect it.”

— Elif Shafak

199. “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

200. “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