There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

Later, when the storm has passed, everyone will talk about the destruction it left behind, though no one, not even the king himself, will remember that it all began with a single raindrop.

For the king knows that in order to dominate other cultures, you must capture not only their lands, crops and assets but also their collective imagination, their shared memories.

Not every written word is meant for the eyes of every reader. Just as not every spoken word needs to be heard by every eavesdropper.

One man’s rebellion, if left unchecked and unpunished, can embolden many dissidents.

As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

It is his first disappointment in life, his earliest sorrow, not being able to hold on to a beauty that has touched him briefly and, just as suddenly, melted away.

Dilê min—“my heart.” That is how Grandma expresses her affection, by turning her own body into an anatomy of love. When she misses Narin, she says, “Come and sit next to me, the corner of my liver”; when she wants to raise her spirits, she says, “Cheer up, the pulse of my neck”; when she cooks her favorite food, she says, “Eat up, the light of my eye; if your tummy is full, then mine rejoices”; and when she wishes to advise her that there is a hidden blessing in every trial, she says, “Don’t forget, my soul, if God closes one door, He opens another. That is why you must never despair, the air in my lungs.” Heart, liver, stomach, lungs, neck, eyes, soul…It is as if love, by its fluid nature, its riverine force, is all about the melding of markers, to the extent that you can no longer tell where your being ends and another’s begins.

That is what growing up means, in some simple way: learning to repress all expressions of pure happiness and joy.

“That is what happens when you love someone—you carry their face behind your eyelids, and their whispers in your ears, so that even in deep sleep, years later, you can still see and hear them in your dreams.”

When the belly is light, the heart will be heavy.”

“Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I’m afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.”

“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.”

An unwavering pendulum swings between day and night. Light and shadow. Good and bad. Perhaps it is the same with past and present—they are not completely distinct. They bleed into each other.

Water hardens in adverse circumstances, not unlike the human heart.

Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be chalked up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion or ethnicity.

Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.

We never want our parents’ weaknesses to be seen by others. Their failures are our own private affair, a secret we would rather keep to ourselves; when they become public, for everyone’s consumption, we are no longer the children we once were.

There is a great deal he does not know. How frightening it is, but also how strangely invigorating to realize that the world he has experienced is only one of many possible worlds.

“Words are like birds,” says Mr. Bradbury. “When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in the mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and laborers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”

How strange that having money makes one feel less safe.

If poverty were a place, a hostile landscape into which you were deliberately pushed or accidentally stumbled, it would be an accursed forest—a damp and gloomy wildwood suspended in time. The branches clutch at you, the boles block your way, the brambles draw you in, determined not to let you out. Even when you manage to cut down one obstacle, instantly it is replaced by another. You tear the skin off your hands as you work doggedly to clear a path elsewhere, but the moment you turn your back the trees close in on you again. Poverty saps your will, little by little.

For every displaced person understands that uncertainty is not tangential to human existence but the very essence of it.

Mourning is a woman’s job—and so is remembrance.

‘daylighting’—returning a lost river to the open air.”

Anyone can wage war, but maintaining peace is a difficult thing.

“Whether turbid or placid, in this land where the stones are ancient and the stories are spoken but rarely written down, it is the rivers that govern the days of our lives. Many kings have come and many kings have gone, and God knows most were ruthless, but here in Mesopotamia, my love, never forget the only true ruler is water.”

Their stories pile up on one another, like pebbles meeting at the bottom of a creek, tossed about by stronger currents.

in deciding what will be remembered, a museum, any museum, is also deciding, in part, what will be forgotten.

Between the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, there’s always a period of confusion, and those are the hardest times, may God help us all.”

“What happens after catastrophes? Those who survive nurse their broken hearts and start all over again, as one always does, as one always must.”

Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time. They live in story-time.

“When someone gives you the food they’ve prepared, they give you their heart.”

“Where you have set your mind begin the journey Let your heart have no fear, keep your eyes on me.”

Empires have a way of deceiving themselves into believing that, being superior to others, they will last forever. A shared expectation that tomorrow the sun will rise again, the earth will remain fertile, and the waters will never run dry. A comforting delusion that, though we will all die, the buildings we erect and the poems we compose and the civilizations we create will survive.

To write is to free yourself from the constraints of place and time.

How can anyone assume they will please the Creator by hurting His Creation?