Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Hadn’t every story she’d been told since she was a child carried the same message? You could traverse deserts, climb mountains, sail oceans and beat giants, so long as you had a crumb of hope in your pocket.”

— Elif Shafak

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

263. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

269. “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

270. “The civilized world is ahead of us; we have no choice but to catch up.”

— Elif Shafak

271. “Since when is being a rotten drunkard a symbol of freedom?”

— Elif Shafak

272. “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

273. “That is why we can suicidally fall in love with others but can rarely reciprocate the love of those suicidally in love with us.”

— Elif Shafak

274. “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

275. “For the same reason, he believed that love had nothing to do with “plans for tomorrow” or “memories of yesterday.” Love could only be here and now.”

— Elif Shafak

276. “I have come to believe that if there is one shape that reaches out to all of us, it is the dome. That is where all the distinctions disappear and every single sound, whether of joy or sorrow, merges into one huge silence of all-encompassing love. When I think of the world this way, I feel dazed and disoriented, and cannot tell any longer where the future begins and the past ends, where the West falls and the East rises.”

— Elif Shafak

277. “Humeyra believed there was something markedly similar about the experience of being overweight and being prone to melancholy. In both cases society blamed the sufferer. No other medical condition was regarded this way.”

— Elif Shafak

278. “Once again she had spent all her monthly savings on books! She was a true bookworm, not a promising feature at all given that it had zero value in the eyes of a boy.”

— Elif Shafak

279. “If you carry a sword, you obey the sword, not the other way round. Nobody can hold a weapon and keep their hands clear of blood at the same time.”

— Elif Shafak

280. “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

281. “Who Am I? Do I have a single identity – based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, gender or geography? Or am I essentially a mixture of multiple belongings, cultural allegiances and diverse inheritances, backgrounds and trajectories? How we define our identity will shape our next steps.”

— Elif Shafak

282. “We can find our true selves only in the faces of the Other.”

— Elif Shafak

283. “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

284. “Humans lose focus easily. Immersed in their politics and conflicts, they get sidetracked, and that is when diseases and pandemics run rampant.”

— Elif Shafak

285. “Never be ashamed of your tears. Cry and everyone knows you’re alive.”

— Elif Shafak

286. “The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to tickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils, curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights.”

— Elif Shafak

287. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

289. “The past is nothing but a shackle we need to get rid of. Such an excruciating burden. If only I could have no past – you know, if only I could be a nobody, start from point zero and just remain there forever. As light as a feather...”

— Elif Shafak

290. “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

291. “But absolutism of all kinds is a weakness. Absolute atheism or absolute theism. To my mind, they are equally problematic. My task is to inject the faithless with a dose of faith and the believers with a dose of skepticism.”

— Elif Shafak

292. “When I asked him about this, he said one should keep the intellect satisfied and yet be careful not to spoil it.”

— Elif Shafak

293. “What difference did it make whether they were hurt or happy, right or wrong, when the sun rose and the moon waned just the same, with or without them?”

— Elif Shafak

294. “At night we heard the howling of the gale and it brought to mind things untamed and unbidden, things within each of us that we were not yet ready to face, let alone comprehend.”

— Elif Shafak

295. “Sanity was a promised land, the Shangri-la she had been deported from as a teenager, and to which she intended to return to one day.”

— 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. “In an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, he stood for a universal spirituality, opening his doors to people of all backgrounds.”

— Elif Shafak

298. “Matrimony might be a fleeting folly that tricked you into believing that it would be forever, but it was harder to appreciate the humor when you were not the one who ended it.”

— Elif Shafak

299. “Never had it occurred to him that you could deceive the person you held dear. It was his first lesson in the complexity of love.”

— Elif Shafak

300. “That is what the past was, that which you could not get rid of. The past did not resemble the crumbs spilled over a rug. You could not shake them out from open windows.”

— Elif Shafak