Top 380 Elif Shafak Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “The Malady of Certainty.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “The past is anything but bygone.”

— Elif Shafak

321. “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

322. “Behind all hardships was a larger scheme. I couldn’t make it out clearly, but I could feel it with my whole heart.”

— Elif Shafak

323. “If you want to destroy something, be it a blemish, acne or the human soul, all you need to do is surround it with walls.”

— Elif Shafak

324. “I don’t think I’ll ever become a real writer and that’s quite all right now. I’ve reached an age at which I’m more at peace with my limitations and failures.”

— Elif Shafak

325. “You were expected to believe in the State for the same reason you were expected to believe in God: fear. The bourgeoisie, despite its glamour and glitz, resembled a child afraid of its father –the eternal patriarch, the Baba. Amidst uncertainty, unlike their counterparts in Europe, the local bourgeoisie had neither audacity nor autonomy, neither tradition nor memory –squeezed between what they were expected to be and what they wished to be.”

— Elif Shafak

326. “The question ‘where are you from?’ has always mattered to me, and felt deeply personal, albeit equally complicated. For a long time it was the one question I dreaded being asked. ‘I am from multiple places,’ I wanted to be able to say in return. ‘I come from many cities and cultures, plural and diverse, but I am also from the ruins and remnants of these, from the memories and forgettings, from the stories and silences.”

— Elif Shafak

327. “If you’re telling me I should accept things as they are... that nations like obedient good wives, should also give up their dreams, their fantasies... then your grasp of international relations – and women for that matter – is weaker than I thought.”

— Elif Shafak

328. “What i’m saying is, my friends, one ought to be able to let go. If a path does not please us, instead of insisting on going that specific way, of making our selfishness the guide, we ought to forsake. The books we cannot write, the films we cannot shoot, the projects we cannot develop, the jobs we cannot pursue and the people who no longer love us. Being able to let go, at times, is the most beautiful of all!”

— Elif Shafak

329. “There were many odd things about human beings. They thought insects were disgusting but felt lucky when a ladybird landed on their fingers. They detested rats but loved squirrels. While they found vultures repulsive, they thought eagles impressive. They despised mosquitoes and flies, but were fond of fire-flies. Even though copper and iron were medicinally important, it was gold that they worshipped instead. They took no notice of the stones under their feet but went mad for polished gems.”

— Elif Shafak

330. “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

331. “In a world that is ever shifting and unpredictable, I’ve come to believe it is totally fine not to feel fine. It is perfectly okay not be okay. If truth be told, if from time to time, you do not catch yourself overwhelmed and exhausted, or even incandescent, maybe you are not really following what is going on – here, there and everywhere.”

— Elif Shafak

332. “To her way of thinking, anyone who can’t rise up and rebel, anyone devoid of the ability to dissent, cannot really be said to be alive. In resistance lies the key to life. The rest of the people fall into two camps: the vegetables, who are fine with everything, and the tea glasses, who, thought not fine with numerous things, lack the strength to confront. It is the latter that are the worse of the two.”

— Elif Shafak

333. “Seven days a week we are forced to contend with bleak feelings, thought rarely do we have the time or the will to give them serious consideration.”

— Elif Shafak

334. “Peki ya diger renkler diye sormak istemis. Eflatunlar, turuncular menekseler... Ya diger kumaslar? Pazenler, basmalar, ipekler, kadifeler... Ne demeye siyah beyaza indiriyorduk su alemi, bu kadar cesitli yaratmisken Yaradan?”

— Elif Shafak

335. “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

336. “Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome.”

— Elif Shafak

337. “Not every word is fit for every ear.”

— Elif Shafak

338. “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

339. “How could meditation help you to quieten your mind when you needed to quieten your mind in order to meditate?”

— Elif Shafak

340. “Granting an equal vote to the ignorant is like handing matches to a toddler.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

342. “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

343. “Lately she had decided to purge certain words from her vocabulary and now that she recalled that decision, why not start with the word shame.”

— Elif Shafak

344. “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

345. “There was something frighteningly dangerous in the expectation that someone had the answer to most of our questions, and that through that person was a shortcut to all that was left unsolved henceforth.”

— Elif Shafak

346. “Truth is a rhizome – an underground plant stem with lateral shoots. You need to dig deep to reach it and, once unearthed, you have to treat it with respect.”

— Elif Shafak

347. “Most of the time he who complains about others is himself at fault.”

— Elif Shafak

348. “One day you’ll look back and say, why was I even worried about that?”

— Elif Shafak

349. “In order to gain mastery, you need to dismantle as much as you put together.”

— Elif Shafak

350. “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