Haleema

“There's something about love that resembles faith. It's kind of a blind trust, isn't it? The sweetest euphoria. The magic of connecting with a being beyond our limited, familiar selves. But if we get carried away by love- or by faith- it turns into a dogma, a fixation. The sweetness becomes sour. We suffer in the hands of gods that we ourselves created.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“As far as she was concerned, the apocalypse was not the worst thing that could happen. The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilization was not half as frightening as the simple realization that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us. Now that, she had always thought, was terrifying.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“What was love if it wasn't nursing someone else's pain as if it were your own?”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“But human memory resembles a late-night reveller who has had a few too many drinks: hard as it tries, it just cannot follow a straight line. It staggers through a maze of inversions, often moving in dizzying zigzags, immune to reason and liable to collapse altogether.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World