10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

by Elif Shafak

Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.

And remember, in the desert of life, the fool travels alone and the wise by caravan.’

The world is no longer the same for the one who has fallen in love, the one who is at its very centre; it can only spin faster from now on.

If there was a God up there, He must be laughing His head off at a human race capable of making atomic bombs and building artificial intelligence, but still uncomfortable with their own mortality and unable to sort out what to do with their dead. How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.

Years later now, it seemed to Nalan that religion – and power and money and ideology and politics – acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything.