Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “People assume it’s a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget. The greater your powers of retention, the slimmer your chances at optimism.”

— Elif Shafak

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “Unlike what nationalist demagogues claim, belonging is not a once-and-for-all condition, a static identity tattooed on our skin; it is a constant self-examination and dynamic revision of where we are, who we are, and where we want to be.”

— Elif Shafak

212. “In general, one shouldn’t be too rigid about anything because “to live meant to constantly shift colours.”

— Elif Shafak

213. “You see, God’s love is an endless ocean, and human beings strive to get as much water as they can out of it. But at the end of the day, how much water we each get depends on the size of our cups. Some people have barrels, some buckets, while some others have only got bowls.”

— Elif Shafak

214. “Play now! Be friends!” Being of the same age group automatically meant getting along well; somehow peers were regarded as the broken pieces of the same puzzle, expected to suddenly make it complete when brought side by side.”

— Elif Shafak

215. “Petite-Ma retained a most special place in Asya’s heart. She loved her dearly. Unlike some others in the family, Petite-Ma had always been capable of loving without suffocating. She would never nag or nitpick or sting. Her protectiveness was not possessive.”

— Elif Shafak

216. “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

217. “Believers favour answers over questions, clarity over uncertainty. Athiests, more or less the same. Funny, when it comes to God, Whom we know next to nothing about, very few of us actually say, ‘I don’t know.”

— Elif Shafak

218. “Intellect and love are made of different materials,” he said. “Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, ‘Beware too much ecstasy,’ whereas love says, ‘Oh, never mind! Take the plunge!’ Intellect does not easily break down, whereas love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble.”

— Elif Shafak

219. “We must do what we can to mend our lives, we owe that to ourselves – but we need to be careful not to break others while achieving that.”

— Elif Shafak

220. “She would rather stay home and, in the witching hours, be immersed in a novel –reading being her way to connect with the universe.”

— Elif Shafak

221. “When you meet different person, another name, another religion, that’s all good. We learn from difference, not from sameness.”

— Elif Shafak

222. “Peri understood and accepted that some daughters were born with a mission: to fulfill their fathers’ dreams. In doing so, they would also be redeeming their fatherland.”

— Elif Shafak

223. “So I guess it is in my genes, this melancholy I can never quite shake off. Carved with an invisible knife into my arborescent skin.”

— Elif Shafak

224. “Whether in the name of God or science, there was no satisfaction for the ego quite like the satisfaction of converting someone to your side.”

— Elif Shafak

225. “Whatever you do, she would have said, don’t hurt anyone and don’t let anyone hurt you. Be neither a heartbreaker nor heartbroken.”

— Elif Shafak

226. “Slowly, dawn was breaking. Streaks of colour – peach bellinis, orange martinis, strawberry margaritas, frozen negronis – streamed above the horizon, east to west.”

— Elif Shafak

227. “Beyond wildest dreams, strange things happened to people when they were ready for the unusual and the unexpected.”

— Elif Shafak

228. “If truth be told, if from time to time you do not catch yourself overwhelmed with worry and indecision, demoralised and exhausted, or even incandescent, maybe you are not really following what is going on – here, there and everywhere.”

— Elif Shafak

229. “Even trees of different species show solidarity with one another regardless of their differences, which is more than you can say for so many humans.”

— Elif Shafak

230. “Her mother had once told her that childhood was a big, blue wave that lifted you up, carried you forth and, just when you thought it would last forever, vanished from sight.”

— Elif Shafak

231. “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.”

— Elif Shafak

232. “The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning. Because the truth is we don’t learn much from sameness and monotony. We usually learn from differences.”

— Elif Shafak

233. “Sometimes family trauma skips a generation altogether and redoubles its hold on the following one. You may encounter grandchildren who silently shoulder the hurts and sufferings of their grandparents.”

— Elif Shafak

234. “It is not up to us to judge and measure each other’s devoutness.”

— Elif Shafak

235. “There is no together anymore. Once a pomegranate breaks and all its seeds scatter in differetnt directions, you cannot put it back together.”

— Elif Shafak

236. “Trees might not have eyes but we have vision.”

— Elif Shafak

237. “She was the youngest of four girls who could not agree on anything but retained an identical conviction of always being right, and feeling each had nothing to learn from the others but lots to teach.”

— Elif Shafak

238. “Without understanding our past, how can we hope to shape our future?”

— Elif Shafak

239. “Each and every reader comprehends the Holy Qur’an on a different level in tandem with the depth of his understanding. There are four levels of insights. The first level is the outer meaning and it is the one that the majority of the people are content with. Next is the Batini – the inner level. Third, there is the inner of the inner. And the fourth level is so deep it cannot be put into words and is therefore bound to remain indescribable.”

— Elif Shafak

240. “I listened to her with respect, knowing what resilient migrants they are, seen almost everywhere across the globe. They can fly for an impressive 2,500 miles. I have never understood why humans regard butterflies as fragile. Optimists they may be, but fragile, never!”

— Elif Shafak

241. “How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.”

— Elif Shafak

242. “She was a foreigner and, like all foreigners, she carried with her the shadow of an elsewhere.”

— Elif Shafak

243. “Those who surround themselves with grovellers who praise everything they do will not forgive the honest man who tells the truth.”

— Elif Shafak

244. “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

245. “From a man getting ready to die, he had turned into a man falling in love at a most unexpected time. Suddenly all the pieces that he thought he’d long ago put into place had to be moved. Spirituality, life, family, mortality, faith, and love- he found himself rethinking their meanings again and not wanting to die.”

— Elif Shafak

246. “We are all a little desexualized, a little defeminized. We can’t carry our bodies comfortably in a society that is so bent against women. In order to be a “brain” in the public realm, we control our “bodies.”

— Elif Shafak

247. “What would we do, each of us, if we were young people in 1930s Burgos, caught up in the midst of civil war? It’s easy to claim in hindsight we’d do the right thing. But, in truth, none of us knows where we would be when the fire is raging.”

— Elif Shafak

248. “You see, there are two kinds: the surface and the deep water. Now, Aphrodite emerged from foam, remember? Foam love is a nice feeling, but just as superficial. When it’s gone, it’s gone, nothing remains. Always aim for the kind of love that comes from the deep.”

— Elif Shafak

249. “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

250. “There was something inscrutable about the collective loss of reason: if enough eyes experienced the same hallucination, it turned into a truth; if enough people laughed at the same misery, it became a funny little joke.”

— Elif Shafak