Top 250 Orhan Pamuk Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Contrary to popular opinion, a man can shut love out if he wants to. But to do so, he must free himself not only from the woman who has bewitched him but also from the third person in the story, the ghost who has put temptation in his way.”

— Orhan Pamuk

202. “Love is good for the skin.”

— Orhan Pamuk

203. “I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on... ” – Conversations with Yahya Kemal.”

— Orhan Pamuk

204. “I saw myself in the mirror, and from my expression I had a shocking intimation of the rift between my body and my soul. Whereas my face was drained by defeat and shock, inside my head was another universe: I now understood as an elemental fact of life that while I was here, inside my body was a soul, a meaning, that all things were made of desire, touch, and love, that what I was suffering was composed of the same elements.”

— Orhan Pamuk

205. “Initially, the talk of misery spreads throughout the neighborhood, becoming in turn the rumor of ill-fortune and later the certainty of doom.”

— Orhan Pamuk

206. “And it enjoyed one other distinction: The Hilton had been, since the day it opened, one of the few civilized establishments in Turkey where a well-heeled gentleman and a courageous lady could obtain a room without being asked for a marriage certificate.”

— Orhan Pamuk

207. “Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called ‘family’, he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life.”

— Orhan Pamuk

208. “Censorship should never be allowed. One should be able to say anything. But I refuse to let politics be foisted on me.”

— Orhan Pamuk

209. “No one drives me into exile, not even the nationalists.”

— Orhan Pamuk

210. “He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself.”

— Orhan Pamuk

211. “We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures.”

— Orhan Pamuk

212. “To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.”

— Orhan Pamuk

213. “It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”

— Orhan Pamuk

214. “There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes.”

— Orhan Pamuk

215. “They were able to deduce from his reports that the sharbat was poisonous to Turks but not to Kurds; however, because of the official state position that Kurds and Turks are indistinguishable, they kept this conclusion to themselves.”

— Orhan Pamuk

216. “I was supposed to be part of a story, but I fell from there like a leaf in autumn.”

— Orhan Pamuk

217. “But despair is what keeps love alive.”

— Orhan Pamuk

218. “Where there’s a lot of money to be made, there’s also a lot of blood to be spilled.”

— Orhan Pamuk

219. “But we should search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else.”

— Orhan Pamuk

220. “In the beginning the point was not to have a point, to escape the world in which everyone had to have a job, a desk, an office.”

— Orhan Pamuk

221. “All the happiness and beauty that life had to offer only revealed themselves when his mind drifted off into fantasies of a world far removed from his own.”

— Orhan Pamuk

222. “The Holy Guide reminded him that in Islam labor was a form of prayer.”

— Orhan Pamuk

223. “I do know this much though: If a man resorts to wiles, guile and petty deceptions, it means he’s nowhere near being in love.”

— Orhan Pamuk

224. “The larger and more colorful a city is, the more places there are to hide one’s guilt and sin; the more crowded it is, the more people there are to hide behind.”

— Orhan Pamuk

225. “My death conceals an appalling conspiracy against our religion, our traditions and the way we see the world. Open your eyes, discover why the enemies of the life in which you believe, of the life you’re living, and of Islam, have destroyed me. Learn why one day they might do the same to you.”

— Orhan Pamuk

226. “There’s been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well.”

— Orhan Pamuk

227. “When there is no one to observe us, the other self we keep hidden inside can come out and do as it pleases. But when you have a father near enough to keep an eye on you, that second self remains buried within.”

— Orhan Pamuk

228. “In order to find meaning and readerly pleasure in the universe the writer reveals to us, we feel we must search for the novel’s secret center, and we therefore try to embed every detail of the novel in our memory, as if learning each leaf of a tree by heart.”

— Orhan Pamuk

229. “Now suddenly he had intimations of destiny; he could see that life had a secret geometry on which his rational mind had no purchase. But even as he was overcome with a desire to subdue his reason and find happiness, he also sensed that – for the moment at least – his yearning for happiness was not yet strong enough.”

— Orhan Pamuk

230. “With the engine stalled, we would notice the deep silence reigning in the park around us, in the summer villa before us, in the world everywhere. We would listen enchanted to the whirring of an insect beginning vernal flight before the onset of spring, and we would know what a wondrous thing it was to be alive in a park on a spring day in Istanbul.”

— Orhan Pamuk

231. “Because Anna Karenina could not read the novel she held in her hands, we read Anna Karenina the novel.”

— Orhan Pamuk

232. “I’m saying this to you as someone who’s spent years as a political exile. Listen to me: Life’s not about principles, it’s about happiness.”

— Orhan Pamuk

233. “Nightclub wars were the worst kind of trouble: back in the day, when rival establishments and their gangs declared war on each other, they would kidnap each other’s singers and belly dancers and hold them hostage, shooting them in the kneecaps eventually.”

— Orhan Pamuk

234. “The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow.”

— Orhan Pamuk

235. “Walking fueled his imagination and reminded him that there was another realm within our world, hidden away behind the walls of a mosque, in a collapsing wooden mansion, or inside a cemetery.”

— Orhan Pamuk

236. “To derive pleasure from a novel is to enjoy the act of departing from words and transforming these things into images in our mind.”

— Orhan Pamuk

237. “The tree is bent when it is young.”

— Orhan Pamuk

238. “Don’t let rich people make you feel ashamed. The only difference between us and them is that they got to Istanbul first and started making money before we did.”

— Orhan Pamuk

239. “The future of a society was not determined by the traits its members shared but rested entirely on their differences.”

— Orhan Pamuk

240. “But don’t forget that arrogant men who think too much of themselves always end up alone.”

— Orhan Pamuk

241. “The poem Ka wrote during the ensuing silence, without a single pause or missing word, he would later call ‘Heaven’. If he placed it on the ‘Imagination’ axis of the snowflake, far from the centre, right at the top, this was not to suggest that Heaven was the future of which we dream: for Ka, Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories.”

— Orhan Pamuk

242. “Maybe you’ve heard the story of the man who was so driven by this curiosity that he roamed among soldiers in battlefields. He sought a man who had died and returned to life amid the wounded struggling for their lives in pools of blood, a soldier who could tell him about the secrets of the Otherworld. But one of Tamerlane’s warriors, taking the seeker for one of the enemy, cleared him in half with a smooth stroke of his scimitar, causing him to conclude that in the Hereafter man is split in two.”

— Orhan Pamuk

243. “Is the need for a father always there, or do we feel it only when we are confused, or anguished, when our world is falling apart?”

— Orhan Pamuk

244. “What we learned from these painstakingly detailed miniatures was how ephemeral all those ancient lives had been, how quickly they’d all been forgotten, and how vain we were to think that we could grasp the meaning of life and history by learning a handful of facts.”

— Orhan Pamuk

245. “Most of the time, being a Turk is either an excuse or a pretext for evil.”

— Orhan Pamuk

246. “But if you don’t have any principles, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t be happy at all,” said Kadife. “That’s true. But in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it’s stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals – only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”

— Orhan Pamuk

247. “Over time, jealousy becomes an element as indispensable as paint in the life of the master artist.”

— Orhan Pamuk

248. “They were so accustomed by now to the random coming and going of the lights that no one bothered anymore with the rituals of power outage.”

— Orhan Pamuk

249. “There was scattered applause from the back, from people presumably in the habit of clapping at anything – or perhaps they were scared.”

— Orhan Pamuk

250. “Even if you did believe in God, it would make no sense to believe alone. You’d have to believe in Him as the poor do; you’d have to become one of them. It’s only by eating what they eat, living where they live, laughing at the same jokes and getting angry whenever they do that you can believe in their God. If you’re leading an utterly different life, you can’t be worshipping the same God they are. God is just enough to know that it’s not a question of reason or logic but how you live your life.”

— Orhan Pamuk