Orhan Pamuk - The Museum of Innocence (2008)

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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?

Orhan Pamuk
In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.

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

Orhan Pamuk
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.

Orhan Pamuk
When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead. we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something,... I don't know,... even an earring.

Orhan Pamuk
People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.

Orhan Pamuk
I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.

Orhan Pamuk
If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.

Orhan Pamuk
With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

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
The gap between compassion and surrender is love's darkest, deepest region.

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

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

Orhan Pamuk
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."

Orhan Pamuk
What is love? I don't know. Love is the name given to the bond Kemal feels with Füsun whenever they travel along highways or sidewalks; visit houses, gardens, or rooms; or whenever he watches her sitting in tea gardens and restaurants, and at dinner tables. Hmmm … that's a lovely answer, But isn't love what you feel when you can't see me? Under those circumstances, it becomes a terrible obsession, an illness.

Orhan Pamuk
As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take it's first solo walk outside the body.

Orhan Pamuk
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.

Orhan Pamuk
Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.

Orhan Pamuk