Sesim > Sesim's Quotes

“Remove the document—and you remove the man.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov

“What you'll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.”
― Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

“He tried to think of all the people in his life as chemicals, the uncertainty of mixing them together, the potential for explosions and scarring.”
― Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

“Where is it written that lives should have a meaning?”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“To be born in that city is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not?”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Yaşam, şimdi ancak kavranılması ve anlaşılması gereken; oysa yaşanması gerçeğine inilmesi ilerideki yıllara atılan bir yabancı öge gibi önümüze getirilmiş. Coğrafya derslerine getirilen yerküre gibi. Kimse yaşadığımız mevsimin, günlerin ve gecelerin yaşamın kendisi olduğundan söz etmiyor. Her an belirtilen bir öğretiye, bizler hep hazırlanıyoruz. Neye?”
― Tezer Özlü, Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri

“Bizi saran sıcaklığın. Soğuyan gecelerin. Ve geceleri bürüyen yıldızların. İki insanın sarılarak geçirdiği bu sarsıntı özü olmalı evrenin. Sonsuza dek varan, var eden, yaşatan, yaşamı ileri çağlara doğru devreden bu birleşme...”
― Tezer Özlü, Çocukluğun Soğuk Geceleri

“Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist. If you’re not a bloodsucking monster, then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven’t completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow’s udder.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“To have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called 'participation,' and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“What a beautiful name,” Kimberly said. “Does it mean anything? I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures.” Kimberly was smiling the kindly smile of people who thought “culture” the unfamiliar colorful reserve of colorful people, a word that always had to be qualified with “rich.” She would not think Norway had a “rich culture.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“You know America has a way of turning everything into an illness that needs medicine.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Do you know that the Sufis believe the world is a mother's womb? she asks. We are all babies in a womb. When the time comes we have to leave the world. We know this but we don't want to leave. We fear that when we die we will cease to exist. But death is actually a birth. If we could understand this we wouldn't be scared of anything.”
― Elif Shafak, Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within

“Bir insan erken gelen yaşlılıklarından sorumludur.”
― Sevgi Soysal, Tante Rosa

“Sarhoş olunur, ama sokakta sızılmaz, âşık olunur ama sokakta yatılmaz, doyulur ama sokakta sıçılmaz, sokak gelip geçmek içindir...”
― Sevgi Soysal, Tante Rosa

“Bir kadının yaşamında, bir Napolyon'la bir Rusya dönüşü olmalı.”
― Sevgi Soysal, Tante Rosa

“At cambazı olması istenmeyen bir kız hemen ata bindirilir, ama at cambazı olsun diye baştan atılan bir kez asla ata bindirilmez.”
― Sevgi Soysal, Tante Rosa

“Çirkinlikleri tekrarlamaktansa enayi başlangıçlara koşturmalı.”
― Sevgi Soysal, Tante Rosa

“Herkesle alay edilebilir. Ama kendi alaylarını yöneltmek yüceltmek elindedir kişinin.”
― Sevgi Soysal, Tante Rosa

“When all else fails, philosophize.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“The grass is wet on the hill. The sky has no end. For the dog who waits for his mistress, Madge, noon comes again.”
― André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs

“... she refused to allow anyone - even Miguel - to refer to Majnoun as 'her' dog.
- I'm as much his as he's mine, she'd insist.
Her friends - and her husband - thought this an annoying eccentricity. Majnoun knew what she meant - that she was not his master - and he was grateful. But in his heart he felt as if he did belong to her, in the sense that he was a part of Nira and she a part of him.”
― André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs

“What is the name of he who comes with eyes closed and fingers black, the one who draws the curtains back when dawn has come? ‘Agha Thanatos’ or just plain ‘Death’? When will I know which is right?”
― André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs

“Perfect understanding between beings is no guarantor of happiness. To perfectly understand another's madness, for instance, is to be mad oneself. The veil that separates earthly beings is, at times, a tragic barrier, but it is also, at times, a great kindness.”
― André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs