Orhan Pamuk Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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.

Orhan Pamuk
What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles and 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.

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

Orhan Pamuk
Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?

Orhan Pamuk
The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That's why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another.

Orhan Pamuk
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?

Orhan Pamuk
Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

Orhan Pamuk
The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is.

Orhan Pamuk
What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.

Orhan Pamuk
How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another 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?

Orhan Pamuk
Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words." From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.

Orhan Pamuk
For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.

Orhan Pamuk
A letter doesn't communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, 'Go on then, read what the letter tells you!' whereas the dull-witted will say, 'Go on then, read what he's written!

Orhan Pamuk
For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

Orhan Pamuk
Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories.

Orhan Pamuk
Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

Orhan Pamuk
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.

Orhan Pamuk
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.

Orhan Pamuk