Top 450 Elif Shafak Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “An ancient clay tablet read, ‘the Babylonian mosquito devil is now in my land; he has slain all the men of my country’. Well, it would have been more accurate if it said, ‘she has slain... ’, as it is the female of the species that causes the carnage, but I guess it’s not the first time women have been written out of history.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

257. “As a storyteller I am less interested in generalizations than in undertones and nuances. These may not be visible at first glance, but they are out there, lurking beneath the surface, durable and distinct.”

— Elif Shafak

258. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

263. “Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western. Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life and a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water.”

— Elif Shafak

264. “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

265. “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

266. “She could detect other people’s sadnesses the way one animal could smell another of its kind a mile away.”

— Elif Shafak

267. “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

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. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “But human memory resembles a late-night reveller who has had a few too many drinks: hard as it tries, it just cannot follow a straight line. It staggers through a maze of inversions, often moving in dizzying zigzags, immune to reason and liable to collapse altogether.”

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

277. “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

278. “The Malady of Certainty.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

290. “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

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. “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

293. “It always made me both immensely sad and elated to listen to a town sleep, wondering what sorts of stories were being lived behind closed doors, what sorts of stories I could have lived had I chosen another path.”

— 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. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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. “How irresponsible of Him to allow terrible things to happen o those who didn’t deserve it. Could God see and hear through prison walls and across cell bars? If He could not, He was not all-powerful. If He could, and still did nothing to help those in need, He was not merciful. Either way, He was not what He claimed to be. He was an impostor.”

— Elif Shafak