Quotes From "The Museum Of Innocence" By Orhan Pamuk

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. Orhan Pamuk

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

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

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

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

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. 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

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

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. 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

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

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

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 Orhan Pamuk

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. Orhan Pamuk

The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region. 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." (p.191) . Orhan Pamuk