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Book: Istanbul: Memories and the City
Quotes of Book: Istanbul: Memories and the
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  1. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving certain moments for prosperity, and as time moved forwards I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives.To watch my uncle pose my brother a maths problem, and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying, with a half-smile, to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room, and at that very same moment to see a picture of him to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so that we could weave them into the present.When, in the tones ordinarily preserved for discussing the founding of a nation, my grandmother spoke of my grandfather who had died so young, and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls, it seemed that she, like me, was pulled in two direction , wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection, savouring the ordinary life but still honouring the ideal. But even as I pondered these dilemmas-if you plucked a special moment from life and framed it, were you defying death, decay and the passage of time, or were you submitting to them? - I grew very bored with them.
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  2. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    I amused myself with mental games in which I changed the focus, deceived myself, forgot altogether what had been troubling me or wrapped in a mysterious haze. We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity; veiling reality instead, hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a tea kettle has been spouting steam on winters day. Steamed-up windows make me feel hüzün, and I still love getting up and walking over to those windows to trace words on them with my finger. As I trace out words and figures on the steamy window, the hüzün inside me dissipates, and I can relax; after I have done all my writing and drawings, I can erase it all with the back of my hand and look outside. But the view itself can bring its own hüzün. The time has come to move towards a better understanding of this feeling that the city of Istanbul carries as its fate.
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  3. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    The difference lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner-the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques-inflict heartache on all who live among them. These
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  4. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    To be able to see the Bosphorus, even from afar-for İstanbullus this is a matter of spiritual import that may explain why windows looking out onto the sea are like the mihrabs in mosques, the altars in Christian churches, and the tevans in synagogues, and why all the chairs, sofas, and dining tables in our Bosphorus-facing sitting rooms are arranged to face the view."
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  5. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    In the beginning the point was not to have a point, to escape the world in which everyone had to have a job, a desk, an office.
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  6. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy or {like all İstanbullus} making it my own.
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  7. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    ...i have in all honesty believed that two people with similar names must have similar characters, that an unfamiliar word - be it Turkish or foreign - must be semantically similar to a word spelt like it, that the soul of a dimpled woman must carry something of the soul of another dimpled woman i knew before, that all fat people are the same, that all poor people belong to a fraternity about which i know nothing, that there must be a link between peas and Brazil - not just because Brazil is Breziliya in Turkish and the word for pea is bezelye but also because the Brazilian flag has, it seems, an enormous pea on it....
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  8. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    Benim için kitap okurken hala önemli olan anlamaktan çok, okuduğum şeye uygun düşler kurmaktır.
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  9. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously{...} I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city .
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  10. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.
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  11. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.
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  12. Orhan Pamuk _ Istanbul: Memories and the

    And before long, the music, the views rushing past the window, my fathers voice and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one, and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions, it was good for us to ask them anyway.
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