Top 450 Elif Shafak Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “So it’s not possible to forget everything. What we call the eyes may succeed in forgetting all of what they’ve seen in life, but it’s impossible to stop thinking about having been seen. If there are no witnesses a person can forget the past. If they are witnesses everything changes. Their every look is an accusation, their existence an obstacle to forgetfulness.”

— Elif Shafak

252. “I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where there being ends and someone else’s starts. With there roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.”

— Elif Shafak

253. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

255. “I believe one reason why humans find it hard to understand plants is because, in order to connect with something other than themselves and genuinely care about it, they need to interact with a face, an image that mirrors theirs as closely as possible.”

— Elif Shafak

256. “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

257. “Do you know that the Sufis believe the world is a mother’s womb? she asks. We are all babies in a womb. When the time comes we have to leave the world. We know this but we don’t want to leave. We fear that when we die we will cease to exist. But death is actually a birth. If we could understand this we wouldn’t be scared of anything.”

— Elif Shafak

258. “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

259. “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

260. “It seemed to Jahan that, in truth, this world, too, was a spectacle. One way or another, everyone was parading. They performed their tricks, each of them, some staying longer, others shorter, but in the end they all left through the back door, similarly unfulfilled, similarly in need of applause.”

— Elif Shafak

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “Things that can seem malicious or unfortunate are often a blessing in disguise, whereas things that might seem unpleasant can be harmful in the long run.”

— Elif Shafak

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “It is a scientifically known fact that collectivities are capable of manipulating their individual members’ beliefs, thoughts, and even bodily reactions. You keep hearing a certain story over and over again, and the next thing you know you have internalized the narrative. From that moment on it ceases to be someone else’s story. It is not even a story anymore, but reality, your reality!”

— Elif Shafak

269. “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

270. “When all is destroyed, pessimists are the first to flee the area, probably; the optimists would choose to wait and see how things would turn out. One of the endless tragedies of human history is that pessimists are better at surviving than optimists, which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carries the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.”

— Elif Shafak

271. “The only professed atheist among Leila’s friends, Nalan saw the flesh – and not some abstract concept of the soul – as eternal. Molecules mixed with soil, providing nutrition for plants, those plants were then devoured by animals, and animals by humans, and so, contrary to the assumptions of the majority, the human body was immortal, on a never-ending journey through the cycles of nature. What more could one possibly want from the hereafter?”

— Elif Shafak

272. “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the humans’ hierarchies?”

— Elif Shafak

273. “How could they be so certain of the superiority of their truths when they knew so little, if anything at all, about other cultures, other philosophies, other ways of thinking?”

— Elif Shafak

274. “How amazing was this ability to achieve plenty by achieving little, to go home empty-handed yet still satisfied at the end of the day!”

— Elif Shafak

275. “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

276. “Sea love seeks sea beauty. And you, my heart, deserve sea love, the strong and profound and enchanting type.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

278. “Male writers are thought of as “writers” first and then “men”. As for female writers, they are first “female” and only then “writers”.”

— Elif Shafak

279. “Today, I think of fanaticism – of any type – as a viral disease.”

— Elif Shafak

280. “The Malady of Certainty.”

— Elif Shafak

281. “I wish I could look back and say that I have learned to love as much as I loved to learn. But if I like, there could be a cauldron boiling for me in hell tomorrow, and who can assure me tomorrow is not already on my doorstep, now that I am as old as an oak tree, and still not consigned to the grave?”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

283. “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

284. “If enough eyes experienced the same hallucination, it turned into a truth.”

— Elif Shafak

285. “An aura surrounds every living thing, an aura in a different colour each time. Do you know what colour is yours?”

— Elif Shafak

286. “For now, grief was pickled and preserved, kept next to the salted meat and dried peppers in the cellars, to be partaken of in better times.”

— Elif Shafak

287. “In many parts of the world you were what you said and what you did and, also, what you read; in Turkey, as in all countries haunted by questions of identity, you were, primarily, what you rejected. It seemed that the more people went on about an author, the less likely it was that they had read their books.”

— Elif Shafak

288. “If only humans could live exposed to the skies, open and unafraid, watching the stars and being watched by them, with nothing to hide.”

— Elif Shafak

289. “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

290. “A bee would work her entire brief life just to make enough honey to fill the tip of a teaspoon.”

— Elif Shafak

291. “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

292. “Well, think about it: a friend is someone you can walk with in the dark and learn lots of things from. But you also know you are different people – you and your friend. You are not your depression. You are much more than what your mood is today or tomorrow.”

— Elif Shafak

293. “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

294. “Because I was always in that limbo between yes and no. No stranger to faith, no stranger to doubt. Undecided. Vacillating. Never self-confident. Maybe it made me who I am, all that uncertainty.”

— Elif Shafak

295. “It is a map, the body of an ex-lover, pulling you into its depths and bringing you back to a part of yourself that you thought had been left behind sometime, somewhere. It is a mirror too, though, chipped and cracked, showing all the ways you have changed; and, like every mirror, it dreams of becoming whole again.”

— Elif Shafak

296. “I have often wondered what resides in an accent. Is it a presence – an identity, a trajectory, a history? Or is it rather an absence – an estrangement, a withdrawal, a blank space refusing to be filled?”

— Elif Shafak

297. “They send me leaflets, booklets, tapes. ‘Let us help your injured soul by shedding the Light upon your darkest hours’ Pompous words! They pretend their message is for all humanity but are ready to burn at the stake anyone who doesn’t go along with them. Still, they feel affection for the likes of me. They just can’t get enough of us. So strong is their desire to correct sinners and score points in God’s eyes. We’re their tickets to heaven. We, the scumbags of the earth- the wicked, the fallen.”

— Elif Shafak

298. “It had been the wisest thing for the five of them to start living together in Leila’s flat and share the costs. They were more vulnerable on their own; together, they.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

300. “And what about our ancestors – can they, too, continue to exist through us? Is that why, when you meet some individuals – just as with some trees – you can’t help feeling that they must be much older than their chronological age? Where do you start someone’s story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning nor is death exactly an end?”

— Elif Shafak