Quote

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.

Orhan Pamuk

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Orhan Pamuk
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 7
Academic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
İstanbul
Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk
Eyes
Affection
Attention
Details
Interest
Wide
Actually
Compassion
Eye
Mystery
Emerges
World
Color
Attending
Open
Colors
Beauty
Irony

More quotes by Orhan Pamuk

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As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them
Orhan Pamuk
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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
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My childhood proved to me that there could be no enjoyment of football without community. But it becomes difficult when this community is having problems with its identity. That's when we experience all possible forms of nationalist exaggeration.
Orhan Pamuk
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To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?
Orhan Pamuk
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The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.
Orhan Pamuk
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Of course in Turkey I'm seen as being on the 'Western' side, criticised by the nationalists, criticised by the communitarians as not belonging. Even, sometimes, criticised for looking at my country through Western eyes. And in the Western media I'm portrayed as belonging to the East.
Orhan Pamuk
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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
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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
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Life can't be all that bad,' i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.
Orhan Pamuk
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My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.
Orhan Pamuk
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What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
Orhan Pamuk
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Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with.
Orhan Pamuk
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Well, on the one hand the Turks have the legitimate need to defend their national dignity - and this includes being recognized as a part of the west and Europe.
Orhan Pamuk
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Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan Pamuk
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We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction
Orhan Pamuk
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In actuality, we don't look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is preciously what they cannot depict. That's why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life.
Orhan Pamuk
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The past is always an invented land.
Orhan Pamuk
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My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.
Orhan Pamuk
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...the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.
Orhan Pamuk
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It's a great relief for me that no one will ask me anymore: Orhan, when will you get the Nobel Prize?
Orhan Pamuk