Top 450 Elif Shafak Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “An aura surrounds every living thing, an aura in a different colour each time. Do you know what colour is yours?”

— Elif Shafak

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

317. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “Creeping in menacingly, ticking like a pendulum clock that never winds down, it takes hold of you faster when you are part of an enclosed, homogenous unit.”

— Elif Shafak

350. “Books, like paper lanterns, provide us with a light amidst the fog.”

— Elif Shafak