Top 250 Orhan Pamuk Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “In a smoky corner of my mind I was reminded of a truth drawn from bitter experience: immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.”

— Orhan Pamuk

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “Estoy sufriendo las penas del infierno sin ni siquiera haber muerto.”

— Orhan Pamuk

206. “Love is good for the skin.”

— Orhan Pamuk

207. “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

208. “Sewaktu muda, Ka sangat meyakini bahwa tidak ada yang lebih terhormat selain mati akibat alasan politik intelektual, atau untuk membela apa yang telah ditulisnya.”

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

214. “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

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

— Orhan Pamuk

216. “Like most Turkish men of my world who entered into this predicament, I never paused to wonder what might be going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I only fantasized about her.”

— Orhan Pamuk

217. “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

218. “I’m not indignant,” I said indignantly.”

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “My fear, which I shared with everyone in the Turkish secular bourgeoisie, was not of God but of the fury of those who believed in Her too much.”

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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. “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

231. “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

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

— Orhan Pamuk

233. “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

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. “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

236. “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

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

— Orhan Pamuk

238. “Thoughts ramble through my head like nervous burglars in a pitch-black house.”

— Orhan Pamuk

239. “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

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

— Orhan Pamuk

241. “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

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

— Orhan Pamuk

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

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. “Of course he was conceited: having devoured most of what had been accomplished before his time, he turned up his nose at it all; he had no doubt he’d do better; he had no equal; he knew he was more intelligent and creative than anyone else. In short, he was an average youth.”

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk