Museum Of Innocence Quotes

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

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

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

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?

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

Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy.

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.

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

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.

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

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.

Happiness means being close to the one you love, that's all. (Taking immediate possession is not necessary.)

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.

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.

In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.

Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life.

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)

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?

But there are some things, child, that you should steal. That you must steal, if you have enough love and courage in your heart. You must snatch freedom from the hands of the tyrant. You must spirit away innocent lives before they are destroyed. You must hide secret and sacred places.

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.

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

Herkes bilsin, çok mutlu bir hayat yaşadım.

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.

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.

Hayatımın en mutlu anıymış, bilmiyordum.

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.

En realidad nadie sabe que está viviendo el momento más feliz de su vida mientras lo vive.

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.

It's important, no doubt, to understand the person we love. If we cannot manage this, it's necessary, at least, to believe we understand them. I must confess that over the entire eight years I only rarely enjoyed the contentment of the second possibility, let alone the first.

when we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape as in a novel we can identify our happiest moment selecting it in retrospective

If we love someone very much, we know that even if we give him the most valuable thing we have, we know not to expect harm from him. This is what a sacrifice is.

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

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently?

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory — of this there is no doubt.

This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.

...no one recognises the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it

...for a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering.

When I was far from Füsun, the world troubled me; it was a puzzle whose pieces were all out of place. The moment I saw her, they all fit back together, reminding me that the world was a beautiful, meaningful whole where I could relax.

No one recognises the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant 'now', even having lived such moments before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe that a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, particularly anyone who is young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: if a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful.

...the true collector’s only home is his own museum.

...love is deep attention, deep compassion...

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.

Pour elle, aimer, c'était prendre tous les risques et donner notre vie pour quelqu'un, oui, l'amour était une chose de cet ordre. Mais dans la vie, cela ne se produisait qu'une seule fois.

..slowly I discerned a familiar shift in my concentration. That compulsion that prohibits me from completely surrendering to a work of art, drawing me from the halls of a favored museum to my own drafting table. Pressing me to close Songs of Innocence in order to experience, as Blake, a glimpse of the divine that may also become a poem. That is the decisive power of a singular work:a call to action. And I, time and again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call

As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred - and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth. Look at the grande Doumo of Florence - a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. Like all other men, I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. "Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?

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.

Bazan Füsun'un hayallere daldığını yüzünden anlar, onun hayal ettiği ülkeye gitmek ister, ama kendimi, hayatımı, ağırlığımı, masada oturuşumu çok umutsuz bulurdum.

Hayatımın en mutlu anıymış, bilmiyordum." [...] "Herkes bilsin, çok mutlu bir hayat yaşadım.

Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations.

Masumiyet Müzesi, İstanbul'da öpüşecek bir yer bulamayan âşıklara sonsuza kadar açık kalacaktır.

because people only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.

Him…. If we love someone very much, we know that even if we give him the most valuable thing we have, we know not to expect harm from him. This is what a sacrifice is.

...I see fetal sciences in you, mummified poems, and bones of my romantic secrets and old innocence. Shall I hang you on the wall of my emotional museum, beside the dark, chill, sleeping irises of my evil? Or shall I spread you over the pines ―suffering book of my love― so you can learn about the song the nightingale offers the dawn?...

For cities are museums of time, and to live in them is to be haunted by the places they once were. The waterways that existed before the skyscrapers and freeways are a vanished world that beacons to us. When we catch glimpses of them, the city disappears. Its too-known streets dissolve into unfathomable terrain. It becomes innocent again. We want to unmake the city. To regain a lost paradise.

You're innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got your degree, you didn't shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too, were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything." "Everything?" "Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmos. but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same. And there are other pendulums: there's one in New York, in the UN building, there's one in the science museum in San Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it." "God is everywhere." "In a sense, yes. That's why the Pendulum disturbs me. It promises the infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. So it isn't enough to worship the Pendulum; you still have to make a decision, you have to find the best point for it. And yet..." "And yet?" "And yet... You're not taking me seriously by any chance, are you, Casaubon? No, I can rest easy; we're not the type to take things seriously.... Well, as I was saying, the feeling you have is that you've spent a lifetime hanging the Pendulum in many paces, and it's never worked, but there, in the Conservatoire, it works.... Do you think there are special places in the universe? On the ceiling of this room, for example? No, nobody would believe that. You need atmosphere. I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe, to recognize it, we have to believe in it. Well, let's go see Signor Garamond." "To hang the Pendulum?" "Ah, human folly! Now we have to be serious. If you are going to be paid, the boss must see you, touch you, sniff you, and say you'll do. Come, let the boss touch you; the boss's touch heals scrofula.

But there are some things, child, that you should steal. That you must steal, if you have enough love and courage in your heart. You must snatch freedom from the hands of the tyrant. You must spirit away innocent lives before they are destroyed. You must hide secret and sacred places.

If the lycée teachers studying this book in their class are now beginning to get nervous, they can advise the students to skip this page.

other party guests paraded just in front of us one by one in their chic outfits, but the thick leaves of a potted cyclamen shielded us from view.

we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.

I'm not indignant," I said indignantly.

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.

Aslında "hemen evlenelim" demeliydim ona. Toplumumuzu ayakta tutan pek çok sağlam evlilik bu tür fırtınalı ve mutsuz aşkları unutmak için yapılmıştır.

This is my Lost Property cupboard theory of the afterlife - when we die we are taken to a great lost property cupboard where all the things we have ever lost have been kept for us - every hairgrip, every button and pencil, every tooth, every earring and key, every key, every pin. All the library books, all the cats that never came back, all the coins, all the watches (which will still be keeping time for us). And perhaps, too, the other less tangible things - tempers and patience (perhaps Patricia´s virginity will be there), religion, meaning, innocence and oceans of time.

God knows that parents love to take any opportunity to strut around with their unbearable, intrusive spawns, every public place available. Parks, museums, theaters, hospital, cemeteries, unemployment offices, by pushing in front of them with a puffed chest those characatures of a sarcophagus that are their strollers or even by dangling under the noses of innocent bystanders, their shopping basket from which an ugly squealing head emerges, much to the delight of the makers, who benefit at little cost from their little siren who captures our attention and stimulates our repressed instinct for murder.

Yeni bir mekana, bir eve ilk defa gelmiş çocukların, hayatın sillesini daha yemediği için hala her şeye karşı meraklı ve açık kalabilen genç insanların yapabildiği gibi pencereden dışarıya ilgiyle baktı.

...a mitad de la cena, de repente me dijo que intuía que un día sería muy feliz. Y aquellas palabras me hicieron sentir con mayor claridad que se me había cerrado la posibilidad de ser feliz en la vida...

Even if you’re not happy”—here, she indicated my brother with her eyes—“even when you’re having your worst day you live your life as if you are. All sorrows fade away when you’re surrounded by your family.

İstanbul'da, ağırlığı biraz değişse de, milyonlarca kişinin yarım yüzyıldır katık olarak yalnızca bu ekmeği yediğini hatırlatmak ve hayatın bir tekrar olduğuna, ama sonra her şeyin acımasızlıkla unutulduğuna işaret etmek de istiyorum.

In 'Physics' Aristotle makes a distinction between time and the single moments he describes as the ‘present'. Single moments are—like Aristotle’s atoms — indivisible, unbreakable things. But Time is the line that links these indivisible moments. Though Tarık Bey asked us to forget Time — that line connecting one present moment to the next — no one except for idiots and amnesiacs can succeed in forgetting it altogether. A person can only try to be happy and forget Time, and this we all do.

Sibel, Batı dışı ülkelerin, özellikle İslam ülkelerinin burjuvalarının yerinde sezgisiyle, psikanalizi aile içi dayanışma ve sır paylaşma yoluyla tedavi alışkanlığı olmayan Batılılar için icat edilmiş "bilimsel bir sır verme" ritüeli olarak görürdü.

And it enjoyed one other distinction: The Hilton had been, since the day it opened, one of the few civilized establishments in Turkey where a well-heeled gentleman and a courageous lady could obtain a room without being asked for a marriage certificate.

She continued talking enthusiastically about the story until I promised to visit the museum as soon as I could. I refrained from explaining that I was too busy working on the case of an innocent black man the community was trying to execute after a racially biased prosecution.

Actually the prophet Abraham didn’t want to kill his son at all. But the command was from God. If we don’t submit to God’s every command, then the world will turn upside down, the Judgment Day will be upon us…. The foundation of the world is love. The foundation of love is the love we feel for God.

I hate all modern art, because it’s mad at God,” he likes to say. Most Catholics have never recovered from that painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung all over it. They are under the assumption there are entire museums in New York dedicated to anti-Catholic shit paintings, where all varieties of zoo scat are flung at pictures of the innocent Virgin.

Kadınla erkeğin yan yana gelemediği, birbirleriyle görüşüp konuşamadığı memlekette aşk olmaz (...) Neden biliyor musun? Çünkü erkekler uygun bir kadın görür görmez, iyi-kötü, güzel-çirkin, hiç bakmaz, haftalardır aç kalmış hayvanlar gibi üzerine atlarlar. Hepsinin alışkanlığı budur. Sonra da bunu aşk zannederler. Böyle bir yerde aşk olur mu? Sakın kendini kandırma.

...slowly I discerned a familiar shift in my concentration. That compulsion that prohibits me from completely surrendering to a work of art, drawing me from the halls of a favored museum to my own drafting table. Pressing me to close Songs of Innocence in order to experience, as blake, a glimpse of the divine that may also become a poem. That is the decisive power of a singular work:a call to action. And I, time and again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call.

A veces pensaba que si conseguía situación como un producto de mi estructura mental o de mis carencias espirituales me libraría del dolor, pero como eso me revelaba como a alguien débil en exceso dependiente del cariño de una madre-ángel-amante salvadora, nunca llegaba hasta el final de ese tipo de consideraciones, y para no dejarme llevar por la desesperación la mayor parte de las veces intentaba convencerme de que estaba venciendo mi dolor nadando de espaldas. Pero sabía perfectamente que me engañaba a mí mismo.

To readers and museum visitors who are curious to know whether the pain I endured that day was owing to the death of my father or to Füsun’s absence, I would like to say that the pain of love is indivisible. The pains of true love reside at the heart of our existence; they catch hold of our most vulnerable point, rooting themselves deeper than the root of any other pain, and branching to every part of our bodies and our lives. ...The anguish of love had disciplined me—brought me to maturity—but in ruling my mind, it gave me scant latitude to use the reason that maturity had brought me. A man like me, too long captive to a destructive passion, will continue on the course his reason tells him is wrong, even if he knows it will bring him to sorrow; in time, he’ll see only more and more clearly how wrong was his path. In such situations there is an interesting phenomenon rarely remarked upon: Even on our worst days, our reason does not stop speaking to us; even if unequal to the power of our passion, it continues to whisper with merciless candor that our actions will serve no purpose but to heighten our love, and therefore our pain.

İlk o söylemişti. Füsun’dan sonra söylediğim için benim hakiki aşk sözlerime bir teselli, nezaket ve taklit tınısı sinmişti. Dahası, o anda ben gerçekten ona, onun bana âşık olduğundan daha da çok âşık olsaydım bile (bir ihtimal bu doğruydu da), aşkının aldığı korkutucu boyutu ilk Füsun itiraf ettiği için oyunu o kaybetmişti. Nereden, hangi rezil tecrübelerden edinmiş olduğumu bilmek bile istemediğim içimdeki “aşk bilgesi”, tecrübesiz Füsun’un, benden daha içten davrandığı için “oyunu” kaybettiğini sinsice müjdeliyordu bana. Bundan, artık kıskançlık derdimin ve takıntılarımın sona ereceği sonucunu çıkarabilirdim.

It’s not so simple. Many girls suffer terribly, being unable to make up their minds. Or else they give in to desire but are too afraid to take any pleasure from it…. I don’t even know if there is any girl out there who can enjoy it for what it is and damn the consequences. And Mehmet, if he hadn’t listened to all those stories of sexual freedom in Europe with his mouth watering, he might not have got it into his head that he had to have sex with a girl before marrying her, just to be modern or civilized; he’d probably have been able to make a happy marriage with a decent girl who loved him. Now look at him, squirming in that chair next to Nurcihan.

After my return to Paris, one thing seemed obvious: To see Manhattan again, to feel as good about New York as Liza Minnelli sounded singing about it at Giants Stadium in 1986 (Google it), I had to start treating it as if it were a foreign city; to bring a reporter's eye and habits, care, and attention to daily life. But as that was the sort of vague self-directive easily ignored, I gave myself a specific assignment: Once a week, during routine errands, I would try something new or go someplace I hadn't been in a long while. It could be as quick as a walk past the supposedly haunted brownstone at 14 West 10th Street, where former resident Mark Twain is said to be among the ghosts. It could a stroll on the High Line, the elevated park with birch trees and long grasses growing where freight trains used to roll. Or it could be a snowy evening visit to the New York Public Library's Beaux-Arts flagship on Fifth Avenue, where Pamuk wrote the first sentence of The Museum of Innocence. There I wandered past white marble walls and candelabras, under chandeliers and ornate ceiling murals, through the room with more than ten thousand maps of my city, eventually taking a seat at a communal wood table to read a translation of Petrarch's Life of Solitude, to rare to be lent out. Tourist Tuesdays I called these outings, to no one but myself.

The southern half possesses the most outstanding scenery, the prettiest villages, the best gastronomy and, withal, a Gallic knack for living well, while the north has the finest cities, the most outstanding museums and churches, the ports, the coastal resorts, the bulk of the population, and most of the money. The Flemings can’t stand the Walloons and the Walloons can’t stand the Flemings, but when you talk to them a little you realize that what holds them together is an even deeper disdain for the French and the Dutch. I once walked around Antwerp for a day with a Dutch-speaking local, and on every corner he would indicate to me with sliding eyes some innocent-looking couple and mutter disgustedly under his breath: “Dutch.” He was astonished that I couldn’t tell the difference between a Dutch person and a Fleming. When pressed on their objections, the Flemings become a trifle vague. The most common complaint I heard was that the Dutch drop in unannounced at mealtimes and never bring gifts. “Ah, like our own dear Scots,” I would say.

Having become—with the passage of time—the anthropologist of my own experience, I have no wish to disparage those obsessive souls who bring back crockery, artifacts, and utensils from distant lands and put them on display for us, the better to understand the lives of others and our own. Nevertheless, I would caution against paying too much attention to the objects and relics of “first love,” for these might distract the viewer from the depth of compassion and gratitude that now arose between us. So it is precisely to illustrate the solicitude in the caresses that my eighteen-year-old lover bestowed upon my thirty-year-old skin as we lay quietly in this room in each other’s arms, that I have chosen to exhibit this floral batiste handkerchief, which she had folded so carefully and put in her bag that day but never removed. Let this crystal inkwell and pen set belonging to my mother that Füsun toyed with that afternoon, noticing it on the table while she was smoking a cigarette, be a relic of the refinement and the fragile tenderness we felt for each other. Let this belt whose oversize buckles that I had seized and fastened with a masculine arrogance that I felt so guilty for afterwards bear witness to our melancholy as we covered our nakedness and cast our eyes about the filth of the world once again.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.

Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; it’s moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese English. But the ideologies stay in their places. They do not spread like the swine flu, or through sexual contact. They spread through books and films and things of that nature. The dictatorships of Latin America used to ban books, they used to burn them, just like Franco did, like Pope Gregory IX and Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Now they don’t have to because the best place to hide ideologies is in books. The dictatorships are mostly gone—Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. The military juntas. Our ideologies are not secrets. Even the Ku Klux Klan holds open meetings in Alabama like a church. None of the Communists are still in jail. You can buy Mao’s red book at the gift shop at the Museum of Communism. I will die soon, in the next five to ten years. I have not seen progress during my lifetime. Our lives are too short and disposable. If we had longer life expectancies, if we lived to 200, would we work harder to preserve life or, do you think that when Borges said, ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe in only those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive,’ we would simply alter it to say ‘first two centuries’? I have heard people say we are living in a golden age, but the golden age has passed—I’ve seen it in the churches all over Latin America where the gold is like glue. The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages but only because they are forgotten, because the past is shrouded in darkness, because as we lay one century of life on top of the next, everything that has come before seems old and dark—technological advances provide the illusion of progress. The most horrendous tortures carried out in the past are still carried out today, only today the soldiers don’t meet face to face, no one is drawn and quartered, they take a pill and silently hope a heart attack doesn’t strike them first. We are living in the age of dissociation, speaking a government-patented language of innocence—technology is neither good nor evil, neither progress nor regress, but the more advanced it becomes, the more we will define this era as the one of transparent secrets, of people living in a world of open, agile knowledge, oceans unpoliced—all blank faces, blank minds, blank computers, filled with our native programming, using electronic appliances with enough memory to store everything ever written invented at precisely the same moment we no longer have the desire to read a word of it.” ― John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque

Cuidado com as coisas de que mais tarde pode se arrepender.

Se eu me arrependo de alguma coisa (...) é ter deixado de lutar pelo que queria na vida, e por isso só posso culpar a mim mesma.

Aşk nedir?” “Neymiş?” “Aşk, Füsun'un karayolları, kaldırımlar, evler, bahçeler ve odalarda gezinirken ve çay bahçelerinde, lokantalarda ve akşam yemeği sofrasında otururken, ona bakan Kemal'in duyduğu bağlılık duygusuna verilen addır.” “Hmmm… güzel cevap” derdi Füsun. “Beni görmediğin zaman aşk olmuyor mu?” “O zaman fena bir takıntı, bir hastalık oluyor.

Ninguém reconhece o momento mais feliz da sua vida no instante em que o vive.

Era o momento mais feliz da minha vida, mas eu não sabia. Se soubesse, se tivesse dado o devido valor a essa dádiva, tudo teria acontecido de outra maneira? Sim, se eu tivesse reconhecido aquele momento de felicidade perfeita, teria agarrado com força e nunca deixaria que me escapasse.

Em seus olhos havia a luz que só se vê em crianças que chegam a um lugar novo, ou nos jovens ainda abertos a novas influências, ainda curiosos quanto ao mundo porque ainda não foram calejados pela vida.

At such moments I would stand up and go to the bay window, where Lemon the canary was slowly aging in his cage, and I would peek through the curtains over the middle or right-hand panes at Çukurcuma Hill. On wet days you could see the light of the streetlamps reflected on the cobblestones. Without taking their eyes off the screen, Aunt Nesibe and Tarık Bey would be prompted to say: “Has he eaten his food?” “Shall we change his water?” “He’s not very happy today.

The “sage of love” within me (acquired from who knew what egregious experience) was crowing about Füsun’s misstep: By speaking too sincerely, she had lost. From this reaction I deduced that my jealous worries and obsessions would soon subside.

Our apartment was at the top of a tall building opposite Teşvikiye Mosque, and our bedroom windows looked out on many other families’ bedrooms that resembled ours; since childhood I had found strange comfort in going to my dark bedroom to look into other people’s apartments.

studying biology” was our code word for visiting the brothel. We remembered there was a sign on the front of the mansion, READING CRESCENT HOTEL-RESTAURANT, and that the girls had botanical aliases—Flower, Leaf, Daphne, Rose.

There was still plenty of time to spare when Çetin Efendi dropped my parents and me at the revolving doors, which were shaded by a canopy in the form of a flying carpet.

You must be joking! What exactly could they be laughing about?” “Well, I didn’t hear it directly, of course. Kenan told Füsun. And she told me…. And she was quite upset, too. Apparently it’s general knowledge at Satsat that every night at quitting time, you and Sibel would meet there for a romp on the divan in the corner office. This is what all the snickering was about.” “What’s happened now?

felicitous intuition so prevalent in the bourgeoisies of non-Western countries, and most particularly Muslim countries, saw psychoanalysis as a “scientific sharing of confidences” invented for Westerners unaccustomed to the curative traditions of family solidarity and shared secrets.

At the same time, far bolder, greedier actors and producers, most of them regulars at the Pelür, were involved in domestic productions that must go down in history as “the first Islamic porn films.” The “love scenes” in their films mixed sex with slapstick, as the gasping and moaning proceeded with ludicrous exaggeration, as the actors assumed all the positions that could be learned from European sex manuals bought on the black market, though all involved, male and female alike, would never remove their underpants.