Top 450 Elif Shafak Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Superstitions are the shadows of fears unknown.”

— Elif Shafak

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “Sometimes it is necessary to destroy all attachments in order to win over your self.”

— Elif Shafak

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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. Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.”

— Elif Shafak

214. “People from troubled islands can never be normal. We can pretend, we can even make amazing progress – but we can never really learn to feel safe. The ground that feels rock hard to others is choppy waters for our kind.”

— Elif Shafak

215. “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

216. “They ooze down slowly, a flow so slight as to be imperceptible, moving across time and space, until they find a crack in which to settle and coagulate. The path of an inherited trauma is random; you never know who might get it, but someone will.”

— Elif Shafak

217. “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

218. “If a stone hits a river, the river will treat it as yet another commotion in its already tumultuous course. Nothing unusual. Nothing unmanageable. If a stone hits a lake, however, the lake will never be the same again.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

221. “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

222. “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

223. “Early on she learned that there was no fight more hurtful than a family fight, and no family fight more hurtful than one over God.”

— Elif Shafak

224. “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

225. “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

226. “As you aged you cared less and less about what others thought of you, and only then could you be more free.”

— Elif Shafak

227. “Throughout my long life, I have observed, again and again, this psychological pendulum that drives human nature. Every few decades they sway into a zone of unbridled optimism and insist on seeing everything through a rosy filter, only to be challenged and shaken by events and catapulted back into their habitual apathy and listless indifference.”

— Elif Shafak

228. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

230. “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

231. “Architecture is a conversation with God. And nowhere does He speak more loudly than at the centre.”

— Elif Shafak

232. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

234. “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

235. “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

236. “How soon things changed and how low people fell and from what heights. Even those whom he thought untouchable. Or perhaps, especially those. It was as if there were two invisible arcs: with our deeds and words we ascended; with our deeds and words we descended.”

— Elif Shafak

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— 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. “Perhaps nothing was worth worrying about in a city where everything was constantly shifting and dissolving, and the only thing they could ever rely on was this moment in time, which was already half gone.”

— Elif Shafak

243. “She had always suspected that even the calmest and sweetest women under stress were prone to outbursts of violence. Since she thought of herself as neither calm nor sweet, she had reckoned that her potential to lose control was considerably greater than theirs.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

246. “There was something childlike in the way grown-ups had a need for stories. They held a naive belief that by telling an inspiring anecdote-the right fable at the right time-they could lift their children’s moods, motivate them to great achievements and simply change reality. There was no point in telling them that life was more complicated than that and words less magical than they presumed.”

— Elif Shafak

247. “Ecco cosa succede quando sei in un Paese straniero: raccogli dettagli come se fossero conchiglie su una spiaggia.”

— Elif Shafak

248. “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

249. “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

250. “If wanting to be heard is one side of the coin, the other side is being willing to listen.”

— Elif Shafak