Emine

“Ararsa yokum. Ben bir rüyayım artık. Arzu ile tekrar görülemem. Hafızasında yadigârım.”
― Peyami Safa, Yalnızız

“Bir gün, belki on sene oluyor, bir hocam bana: "Zekanı mirasyedi gibi harcıyorsun!" demişti. Doğru... Zekamı har vurup harman savurdum ve nihayet iflas ettim... Hiçbir şeyim kalmadı... Ben zekayı radyum gibi bitip tükenmez bir cevher sanıyordum...”
― Sabahattin Ali, İçimizdeki Şeytan

“İstediğim bütün kitapları okuyamam, olmak istediğim bütün insanlar olamam ve istediğim hayatları süremem, istediğim bütün becerileri edinemem. Öyleyse ne istiyorum?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“What remained of that Baghdad, I wondered? The Baghdad of fountains of knowledge. The Baghdad at the centre, the fulcrum of a globalized culture that went on to humanize Europe: the Baghdad that taught Europe the distinction between civil society and barbarism, the difference between medicine and magic, and the importance of experimental method; the Baghdad that trained the West in scholastic and philosophic method, drilled it in making surgical instruments, told it how to establish and run hospitals and provided it with the model of a university complete with curriculum and syllabus, terminology and administrative structure; the Baghdad that schooled Europe in the importance of biography, the novella, the history of cities and historical and textual criticism. In short, the Baghdad that gave Europe its most prized possession: liberal humanism. By what intellectual conjuring trick had Europe self-servingly made the reality of its cultural debt disappear into a fairy-tale dream of Sinbad, Aladdin, harem ladies in diaphanous veils, the subject matter of pantomime and other such dissembling misrepresentations?”
― Ziauddin Sardar, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim