Top 450 Elif Shafak Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Because you are so desperate to win the approval of others, you’ll never get rid of their criticisms, no matter how hard you try.” I.”

— Elif Shafak

402. “Words are like birds, when you publish books you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in mansions of gentry, in farmsteads and laborers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”

— Elif Shafak

403. “You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for Him: in the heart of a true lover.”

— Elif Shafak

404. “One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it is left behind.”

— Elif Shafak

405. “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

406. “One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion or passivity, may I suggest submission? Some people make the mistake of confusing “submission” with “weakness,” whereas it is anything but. Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.”

— Elif Shafak

407. “What happens after catastrophes? Those who survive nurse their broken hearts and start all over again, as one always does, as one always must.”

— Elif Shafak

408. “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

409. “The world would have been a much more interesting place if everyone was given a chance to meet their ancestors at least for an hour in their lifetime.”

— Elif Shafak

410. “We never want our parents’ weaknesses to be seen by others. Their failures are our own private affair, a secret we would rather keep to ourselves; when they become public, for everyone’s consumption, we are no longer the children we once were.”

— Elif Shafak

411. “The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilisation was not half as frightening as the simple realisation that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us.”

— Elif Shafak

412. “Getting through life as unscathed as possible depended to a large extent on two fundamental principles: knowing the right time to arrive and knowing the right time to leave.”

— Elif Shafak

413. “Don’t forget that your mind is a stranger at nights. Don’t talk to strangers.”

— Elif Shafak

414. “Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.”

— Elif Shafak

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

428. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

434. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

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

— Elif Shafak

437. “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

438. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

440. “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

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

— Elif Shafak

442. “Better to be a gentle soul than one consumed by anger, resentment and vengeance. Anyone can wage war, but maintaining peace is a difficult thing.”

— Elif Shafak

443. “She wants to excuse herself from a world where she often feels like an outsider, a confused and clumsy latecomer, an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time.”

— Elif Shafak

444. “If there was a God up there, He must be laughing His head off at a human race capable of making atomic bombs and building artificial intelligence, but still uncomfortable with their own mortality and unable to sort out what to do with their dead. How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.”

— Elif Shafak

445. “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

446. “God created sufferings so that joy might appear through its opposite. Things become manifest through opposites. Since God has no opposite, He remains hidden.”

— Elif Shafak

447. “When the first wave arrived, barely touching her toes, it was so light and translucent a ripple that you might be forgiven for thinking it insignificant, that it would vanish soon, leaving no trace. But then followed another wave, and the next one, rising as far as her ankles, and the one after that covering her knees, and before you knew it she was immersed in liquid pain, up to her neck, drowning.”

— Elif Shafak

448. “Hell is in the here and now. So is heaven. Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in love, we ascend to heaven. Every time we hate, envy, or fight someone, we tumble straight into the fires of hell.”

— Elif Shafak

449. “Grief is a swallow,′ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.”

— Elif Shafak

450. “There are extraordinary people who appear unexpectedly on our paths, and just as suddenly, they disappear, leaving their indelible marks and a sense of regret. Brief and bright, like a match striking a flame in the dark, they heat the damp kindling of out hearts and then they are gone.”

— Elif Shafak