Top 450 Elif Shafak Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

310. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire – because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind – when people hate those they have hurt.” “But why?” “Because the tree remembers what the axe forgets.” “What does that mean?” “It means it’s not the harmer who bears the scars, but the one who has been harmed.”

— Elif Shafak

329. “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

330. “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

331. “The world is no longer the same for the one who has fallen in love, the one who is at its very centre; it can only spin faster from now on.”

— Elif Shafak

332. “But if you are going to claim, as humans do, to be superior to all life forms, past and present, then you must gain an understanding of the oldest living organisms on earth who were here long before you arrived and will still be here after you have gone.”

— Elif Shafak

333. “It seems to me, more and more, we are pain, and hurt, and loneliness covered with skin.”

— Elif Shafak

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “What would we do, each of us, if we were young people in 1930s Burgos, caught up in the midst of civil war? It’s easy to claim in hindsight we’d do the right thing. But, in truth, none of us knows where we would be when the fire is raging.”

— Elif Shafak

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

345. “Everyone in this world has some bent or inclination which, if fostered by favourable circumstances, will colour the rest of his life.”

— Elif Shafak

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

349. “But having spent my whole life regretting the things I failed to do, I see no harm in doing something regrettable for a change.”

— Elif Shafak

350. “Grown ups are not good at masking their concerns, although they can hide their delights and curiosity surprisingly well. Whereas with children it is the other way round. Children can tactfully mute their anxiety and conceal their sorrow, but will struggle not to express their. This is what growing up means, in some simple way: learning to repress all expressions of pre happiness and joy.”

— Elif Shafak