Orhan Pamuk Quotes

ต่อให้คุณเชื่อในพระเจ้าจริง มันจะไปได้เรื่องได้ราวอะไรถ้าคุณเชื่ออยู่คนเดียว คุณจะต้องเชื่อในพระเจ้าแบบเดียวกับที่คนยากจนเชื่อ คุณต้องกลายเป็นหนึ่งในคนพวกนั้นด้วย คุณจะต้องกินสิ่งที่พวกนั้นกิน ใช้ชีวิตแบบที่พวกนั้นเป็น หัวเราะเรื่องตลกที่พวกนั้นหัวเราะกัน แล้วก็โกรธทุกครั้งที่พวกนั้นโกรธ คุณถึงจะเชื่อในพระเจ้าของพวกนั้นได้ ถ้าคุณกลับตาลปัตรใช้ชีวิตที่ต่างออกไป ก็จะเป็นไปไม่ได้ที่คุณจะไปนับถือพระเจ้าองค์เดียวกันกับพวกนั้น

Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.

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.

Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave.

...the waiting was torture, the worst Ka had ever known. It was this pain, this deadly wait, he now remembered, that had made him afraid to fall in love.

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? The only harm they do is to themselves. But that's all they ever wanted in the first place. They feel so guilty about the suffering of the poor, and are so keen to share it, that they make their lives miserable on purpose.

Suddenly Ka realized he was in love with İpek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread.

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 ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.

A man could be at the coffee-house every evening laughing and playing cards with his friends, he could have so much fun with his classmates that there is never a moment they arent´t exploding into laughter, he could spend every hour of the day chatting with his intimates, but if that man has been abandoned by God, he´d still be the loneliest man on earth.

The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.

My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of perserving certain moments for prosperity , and as time moved forwards I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives.To watch my uncle pose my brother a maths problem , and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier ; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying , with a half-smile , to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room,and at that very same moment to see a picture of him to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so that we could weave them into the present.When,in the tones ordinarily preserved for discussing the founding of a nation , my grandmother spoke of my grandfather who had died so young,and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls , it seemed that she , likes me , was pulled in two directions , wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection , savouring the ordinary life but still honouring the ideal.But even as I pondered these dilemmas-if you plucked a special moment from life and framed it , were you defying death , decay and the passage of time. or were you submitting to them ?-I grew very bored with them.pg.13

The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why she now felt that she was on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time.

The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.

...every life is like a snowflake: individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one´s own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of one´s own snowflake.

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

My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously(...) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city .

What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

It's not the content, but the form of thought that counts.

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.

Because, as I would always tell myself so many years later, lying here in my bed: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so, Fatma?

Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we're being heroic, it usually means we're about to kill each other--or kill ourselves.

After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?

As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn't get the image of their lips out of my mind. But by now I'd realised I'd not even be kissing myself; I'd be kissing the mirror.

She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it.

What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination.

Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right.

When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one," I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. "Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest , most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them." (p.191)

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.

...at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.

The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil.

They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves.

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?

ผมเคยเปิดสารานุกรมดูแล้ว คำว่า atheist มาจากคำภาษากรีกว่า athos แต่คำนี้ ไม่ได้หมายถึงคนที่ไม่เชื่อในพระเจ้า มันหมายถึงคนโดดเดี่ยว คนที่พระเจ้าละทิ้งต่างหาก เรื่องนี้พิสูจน์ว่าคนเรานั้นแท้จริงแล้วไม่สามารถเป็น atheist ได้ เพราะต่อให้อยากเป็น พระเจ้าก็จะไม่มีวันทอดทิ้งพวกเราที่นี่ ฉะนั้นการจะเป็น atheist ได้ คุณจะต้องเป็นคนตะวันตกเสียก่อน

Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness.

It’s not enough to be oppressed, you must also be in the right. Most oppressed people are in the wrong to an almost ridiculous degree. What shall I believe in?

These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget. --- from the notebooks of Celal Salik

Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.

The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep.

We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction

Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings people like us so close to God. It's the fact that no one is more curious than we are to learn why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world.

Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared.

Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?

There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.

In the cities of the European Franks, women roam about exposing not only their faces, but also their brightly shining hair (after their necks, their most attractive feature), their arms, their beautiful throats, and even, if what Ive heard is true, a portion of their gorgeous legs; as a result, the men of those cities walk about with great difficulty, embarrassed and in extreme pain, because, you see, their front sides are always erect and this fact naturally leads to the paralysis of their society. Undoubtedly, this is why each day the Frank infidel surrenders another fortress to us Ottomans.

Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere

The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life

After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.

วันหนึ่งในฤดูหนาว สมัยที่คุณเป็นนักเรียนมัธยม หิมะกำลังตก คุณกำลังครุ่นคิดอะไรบางอย่างจนลืมสิ่งอื่น คุณได้ยินเสียงพระเจ้าในตัวคุณ และคุณก็พยายามจะลืมพระองค์ให้ได้ คุณเห็นว่าโลกนี้เป็นหนึ่งเดียว แต่คุณคิดว่าถ้าสามารถหลับตาลงไม่มองภาพนี้ คุณจะเศร้าหมองได้มากกว่าและมีสติปัญญาล้ำเลิศกว่าด้วย ซึ่งคุณก็คิดถูกแล้ว มีแต่คนที่ฉลาดมากๆ หม่นหมองมากๆ เท่านั้นที่จะเขียนบทกวีได้ดี ดังนั้นคุณจึงยืดอกอย่างหาญกล้าและแบกรับความเจ็บปวดของการไร้ศรัทธา เพียงเพื่อจะได้เขียนบทกวีดีๆ แต่หารู้ไม่ว่าเมื่อคุณสูญเสียเสียงข้างในที่ว่านั้นไป สุดท้ายคุณจะลงเอยอย่างโดดเดี่ยวในจักรวาลอันว่างเปล่า

Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness

I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.