There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

“Things don’t disappear just because we wish them to. Even if we cover them with concrete and build over them and pretend they never existed, they’re still part of us, all those ghosts that we thought we’d buried deep inside, and, if we don’t face up to them, they’ll continue to haunt us.”

“It sounds like quite the gift to me. Perhaps you need time to discover how to use it. The sun is weak when it first rises, and gathers strength and courage as the day goes on.”

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.

“People think a tattoo is an act of rebellion or something, but, actually, it’s a form of storytelling. That’s what most customers come in for—not just some random image or word in ink. They come because they have a story to tell.”

Home is where your absence is felt, the echo of your voice kept alive, no matter how long you have been away or how far you may have strayed, a place that still beats with the pulse of your heart.

The debate on museums and who owns cultural heritage is a complicated one, and there is no better space than literature, especially the novel as a literary genre, within which to freely explore the most complex issues of our time with nuance, depth, care and empathy.

Fiction allows us to grasp important and sensitive subjects from multiple angles—a freedom we are steadily losing in the age of social media and unfeeling algorithms.