Top 450 Elif Shafak Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

353. “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

354. “A hushed concentration permeated his movements, and his eyes watched her intently, oblivious to everything else, as though she was, and had always been, the centre of the world.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

356. “Once again she had spent all her monthly savings on books! She was a true bookworm, not a promising feature at all given that it had zero value in the eyes of a boy.”

— Elif Shafak

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “This world is erected upon the principle of reciprocity. Neither a drop of kindness nor a speck of evil will remain unreciprocated. Fear not the plots, deceptions, or tricks of other people. If somebody is setting a trap, remember, so is God. He is the biggest plotter. Not even a leaf stirs outside God’s knowledge. Simply and fully believe in that. Whatever God does, He does beautifully.”

— Elif Shafak

362. “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

363. “I think God comes in many pieces and colors. I can build a peaceful God, all-loving. Or I can build an angry God, punishing. Or maybe I’ll build nothing. God is a Lego set.”

— Elif Shafak

364. “The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.”

— Elif Shafak

365. “Truth cloaks herself.’ ‘Why would truth need to cloak herself?’ ‘Because if she were to walk about naked, people would stone her in the streets.”

— Elif Shafak

366. “The creature who arrived at your door, having bitten the hand that fed him all along, would not hesitate to sink his teeth into your flesh once he was inside.”

— Elif Shafak

367. “Arthur is beginning to suspect that civilization is the name we give to what little we have salvaged from a loss that no one wants to remember. Triumphs are erected upon the jerry-built scaffolding of brutalities untold, heroic legends spun from the thread of aggressions and atrocities.”

— Elif Shafak

368. “From her he had learned two fundamental things about love: first, that unlike what the romantics so pompously argued, love was more a gradual course than a sudden blossoming at first sight, and second, that he was capable of loving.”

— Elif Shafak

369. “Rome, the city where memories were chiseled in marble.”

— Elif Shafak

370. “If you cannot find a reason to love the life you are living, do not pretend to love the life you are living.”

— Elif Shafak

371. “For the king knows that in order to dominate other cultures, you must capture not only their lands, crops and assets but also their collective imagination, their shared memories.”

— Elif Shafak

372. “When something needs to be said, I’ll say it even if the whole world grabs me by the neck and tells me to keep quiet.”

— Elif Shafak

373. “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

374. “Doubts are good. It means you are alive and searching. One does not become a believer overnight. He thinks he is a believer; then something happens in his life and he becomes an unbeliever, after that, he becomes a believer again and then an unbeliever again, and so on. Until we reach a certain stage, we constantly waver. This is the only way forward. At each new step, we come closer to the Truth.”

— Elif Shafak

375. “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

376. “To whom does the object belong – the itinerant bards who recited the poem, travelling from city to city; the king who ordered it to be put in writing; the scribe who laboured in setting it down; the librarian who scrupulously stored it; the archaeologist who unearthed it centuries later; the museum that will keep it safe – or does it belong only to the people of this land, and, if so, will minorities like the Yazidis ever be counted amongst them?”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

378. “She regarded her memory as a graveyard; segments of her life were buried there, lying in separate graves, and she had no intention of reviving them.”

— Elif Shafak

379. “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

380. “Books, it seems to me, do not end, even when we are finished reading them.”

— Elif Shafak

381. “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

382. “The Germans invited you to their country to work, not to mingle, and expected you to leave as soon as you were no longer needed. Adapting to their ways was like trying to embrace a hedgehog. There might be a secret tenderness, a gentle core underneath, but you couldn’t pass the sharp needles to tap into it.”

— Elif Shafak

383. “No storyteller is completely objective. But I have always tried to grasp every story through diverse angels, shifting perspectives, conflicting narratives. 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

384. “Empires have a way of deceiving themselves into believing that, being superior to others, they will last forever.”

— Elif Shafak

385. “Humans tell their children to paint the earth in one colour alone. They imagine the sky in blue, the grass in green, the sun in yellow, and the earth entirely in brown. If only they knew they have rainbows under their feet.”

— Elif Shafak

386. “It is an odd thing, to lose faith in the beliefs you once held firmly. How strange it is to have carried your convictions like a set of keys, only to realize they will not open any doors.”

— Elif Shafak

387. “Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly’s wings.”

— Elif Shafak

388. “Human beings tend to disparage what they couldn’t comprehend.”

— Elif Shafak

389. “For every displaced person understands that uncertainty is not tangential to human existence but the very essence of it.”

— Elif Shafak

390. “First you meet someone – someone who is completely different from everyone around you. Someone who sees everything in a different light and forces you to shift, change your angle of vision, observe everything anew, within and without. You think you can keep a safe distance from him. You think you can navigate your way through this beautiful storm until you realize, much too suddenly, you are thrust out into the open and in fact, you control nothing.”

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

392. “The emperor did not hide his disappointment. “Are you the one Majnun has been crazy about? Why, you look so ordinary. What is so special about you?” Layla broke into a smile. “Yes, I am Layla. But you are not Majnun,” she answered. “You have to see me with the eyes of Majnun. Otherwise you could never solve this mystery called love.”

— Elif Shafak

393. “Yesterday I was a river. Tomorrow, I may return as a raindrop.”

— Elif Shafak

394. “The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practise compassion. And do not gossip behind anyone’s back – not even seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out of our mouth do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time. One man’s pain will hurt us all. One man’s joy will make everyone smile.”

— Elif Shafak

395. “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

396. “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

397. “That’s the thing about failing: either it makes you super-afraid of failing again or, somehow, you learn to overcome fear.”

— Elif Shafak

398. “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

399. “When you master a language, you are given the key to a castle. What you’ll find inside depends on you.”

— Elif Shafak

400. “The ear never forgets what the heart has heard.”

— Elif Shafak