Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Europeans... Westerners... Russians... Arabs... If you were to get to know them, not as a category, but individually, then you would see how we are all, more or less, flesh and mind, the same. We can only recognize ourselves in the faces of... the Other.”

— Elif Shafak

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “In the sheltered bosom of faith, one found the answers by letting go of the questions; one advanced by surrendering.”

— Elif Shafak

312. “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

313. “The past is anything but bygone.”

— Elif Shafak

314. “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

315. “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

316. “A gust of wind blew in from the balcony, fluttering the curtains. For an instant, it was as if there was a new presence in the room. A barely perceptible tickle, like a stray hair on the back of one’s neck. But it grew stronger, and they could feel its power, its pull. Either they had stepped into some invisible realm, or another realm was seeping into theirs.”

— Elif Shafak

317. “Did she ever love me as much as much as I love her? I don’t think so. But I know she did love me in her own self-centered and self-destructive way.”

— Elif Shafak

318. “Resentment is a cage, talent is a captured bird.”

— Elif Shafak

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “Each time Kostas pushed her on the swing, watching her fly away from him, up into the air, laughing and kicking her legs, Ada would shout, ‘Higher, Daddy, higher!’ Struggling with the fear that she might flip over or the metal chains might break off, he would push her harder, and then, as the swing came back, he would have to move out of the way to make space for her. And so it still was, this back and forth, with the father ceding space to his daughter so she could have her freedom.”

— Elif Shafak

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

326. “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

327. “It crossed his mind that maybe one of the most telling differences between the young and the old lay in this detail. As you aged you cared less and less about what others thought of you, and only then could you be more free.”

— Elif Shafak

328. “Imagination was a dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced.”

— Elif Shafak

329. “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

330. “Peri loved words. She held them in her palms like eggs about to hatch, their tiny hearts beating against her skin, full of life.”

— Elif Shafak

331. “Did subsequent generations ineluctably start where previous ones had given up, absorbing all of their disappointments and unfulfilled dreams? Was the present moment a mere continuation of the past, every word an afterword to what had already been said or left unsaid?”

— Elif Shafak

332. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

335. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

337. “Whatever you hate in me, does it not also exist in you?”

— Elif Shafak

338. “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

339. “Peri loved her father’s tales. She had grown up with them. Yet the melancholy with which they were infused pierced her soul, like a splinter under her skin that had become an organic part of her. Sometimes she imagined she had splinters all over – both in her body and in the recesses of her mind.”

— Elif Shafak

340. “Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one’s faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back.”

— Elif Shafak

341. “I am not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake, but when we are inside a good novel we leave our cozy, small apartments behind and, through fictional characters, find ourselves getting to know people we had never met before, and perhaps had even disliked as our Others.”

— Elif Shafak

342. “No one should try to philosophize on the nature of humanity until they had worked in a public toilet for a couple of weeks and.”

— Elif Shafak

343. “He would never have dared to call this thing he felt for Mihrimah love, and yet when it was uttered, unveiled, by someone else, he carefully picked up the word and hugged it to his chest, not willing to let go.”

— Elif Shafak

344. “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

345. “Some day this pain will be useful to you.”

— Elif Shafak

346. “They didn’t hear her, but it was enough that GOD did.”

— Elif Shafak

347. “She had come to learn that the English had an indirect way of expressing their opinions. Unlike the Turks, they did not communicate resentment through resentment or anger through double anger. No, there were layers to their conversation; the deepest discomfort could be conveyed with a reticent smile. They complemented, when in truth they wished to denounce; they clothed their criticisms in cryptic praise.”

— Elif Shafak

348. “I’ll come to the island,’ Ada said, a new note in her voice. ‘I just want to meet islanders, like myself.”

— Elif Shafak

349. “I can tell you one thig about humans: they will react to the disappearance of a species the way they react to everything else – by putting themselves at the center of the universe.”

— Elif Shafak

350. “Someone who plants in your heart a lifetime of things so pleasant yet so minute you don’t realize how much you have come to depend on them until you lose them all.”

— Elif Shafak