Elif Safak Quotes

Time is just an illusion. What you need is to live this very moment. That is all that matters.

Stop running after the waves. Let the sea come to you.

Knowledge that takes you, not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance.

Either grant me the bliss of the ignorant or give me the strength to bear the knowledge.

Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to life, old ones need to wither away.

If you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside.

Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.

I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go.

Personally, I didn't think there was anything wrong with sadness. Just the opposite – hypocrisy made people happy and truth made them sad.

How can you blame others for disrespecting you when you think of yourself as unworthy of respect?

Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.

If you want to experience eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain within the present moment.

Where there is love, there is bound to be heartache.

Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls, and through those holes we can get a glimpse of the other and sometimes even like what we see.

Perhaps this is why lunatics have a harder time dating, not because they are off the wall but because it is hard to find soemone who is willing to date so many people in one person.

The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children.

The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time.

We cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture.

Love exists within each of us from the moment we are born and waits to be discovered from then on.

Isn't connecting people to distant lands and culture one of the strengths of good literature?

Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour.

Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness

A saint belongs to all humanity.

But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die

Because time is a drop in the ocean, and you cannot measure off one drop against another to see which one is bigger, which one is smaller.

Turkey has a very young, dynamic, curious population. In Europe, Facebook and Twitter are mostly about sharing daily experiences while for Turkish people, social networks are political platforms.

The digital world is developing with such force and such a pace that you simply can't ban or control it. People want to be globally connected.

Article Five: If you have no reason or ability to accomplish anything, then just practice the art of becoming.

perhaps it took a stranger to make a woman like her speak her mind.

I remember a time when it was ok to make fun of politicians and powerful people. Now, it's not ok anymore. We've forgotten how to laugh.

I believe in optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. But my hope is the people, the society, which is ahead of the government.

You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I've read a book, I don't feel like I've finished anything. So I start a new one.

Almost half of the Turkish population believes it is not legitimate to criticize the government. Interestingly, this correlates with the number of supporters of Erdogan's government.