Elif Safak Quotes

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  • Author
  • born 1971
  • 115 quotes

Elif Safak, an author (born 1971), is quoted 115 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are People, Moments, Mirrors and Childhood.

Quotes with a ready-made image come first, then the rest in order of how often they are read and shared. Open any quote to copy it, share it, or turn it into a picture quote.

A saint belongs to all humanity.

Believers are each other's mirrors.

Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.

Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.

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

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

I spent my entire childhood observing people. I still do.

Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness

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

We need a dose of doubt and a dose of faith, to challenge each other.

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

What is the point of roaming the world when it's the same misery everywhere?

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

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

I love commuting between languages just like I love commuting between cultures and cities.

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

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

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

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

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

Even a speck of love should not go unappreciated, because, as Rumi said, love is the water of life.

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

If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.

I write with humour about sadness, to introduce an element of sweet to the sour, a bit like Turkish food.

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

Bad writing is like a bad relationship. Don't be addicted to it just because you are familiar with its ways. Let go.

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

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.

When societies go backwards and slide into authoritarianism, nationalism, and tribalism, machismo and sexism are also emboldened.

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

Writing in another language gives me an additional freedom, an additional way of thinking. It's a challenge, but I like the challenge.

Writing is a tribute to solitude. It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.

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.

I find families intriguing, perhaps because I did not grow up in one. I was raised by a feminist, independent, single mother, a divorcee.

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

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.

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.

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.

The lack of trust in supranational entities and cosmopolitan elite creates a fertile ground for tribalist belongings and reactionary politics.

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.

God is the biggest storyteller, and when we create stories, we connect with him and with each other across cultural, religious and gender boundaries.

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

Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.

If you are a writer from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, you don't have the luxury of being apolitical. You can't say, 'That's politics. I'm just doing my work.'

Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Elif Safak is quoted on

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