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Now he has again preceded me a little in parting from this strange world. This has no importance. For people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion. Albert Einstein upon the death of his closest friend, Michele Besso
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.
within every sane mind there was a trace of insanity, and within the depths of madness glimmered a seed of lucidity.
No one should try to philosophize on the nature of humanity until they had worked in a public toilet for a couple of weeks and seen the things that people did, simply because they could –
Mother was gentle with the dead, less so with the living. But the boy thought one should be even gentler with the living than with the dead, because, after all, they were the ones struggling to make sense of this world, weren’t they?
He who has not travelled in the world has no eyes, she thought.
Yet hope is a hazardous chemical capable of triggering a chain reaction in the human soul.
You said cows recognize people who have hurt them in the past. Sheep can identify faces as well. But I ask myself, what good does it do them to remember so much when they can’t change a thing?
If you told them how snails, worms and black sea bass were hermaphrodites, or male seahorses could give birth, or male clownfish turned female halfway through their lives, or male cuttlefish were transvestites, they would be surprised. Anyone who studied nature closely would think twice before using the word ‘natural’.
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.
How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.
‘Grief is a swallow,’ he said. ‘One day you wake up and you think it’s gone, but it’s only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.’
As for the water family, this was formed much later in life, and was, to a large extent, of your own making. While it was true that nothing could take the place of a loving, happy blood family, in the absence of one, a good water family could wash away the hurt and pain collected inside like black soot. It was therefore possible for your friends to have a treasured place in your heart, and occupy a bigger space than all your kin combined. But those who had never experienced what it felt like to be spurned by their own relatives would not understand this truth in a million years. They would
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How could she give others hope and good cheer when she herself was constantly assailed by fears and worries?
But underneath that hood where there were no directions, and the sky and the land melted into a swathe of black linen, though comforted, the falcon would still feel nervous, as if in preparation for a blow that could come at any moment. 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. Not her though. As she
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We must do what we can to mend our lives, we owe that to ourselves – but we need to be careful not to break others while achieving that.’
‘Have you got any food with you, Humeyra?’ ‘Why are you asking me?’ ‘Open that bag. What do you have in there?’ ‘Just coffee,’ Humeyra said at first, but then sighed. ‘Okay, I’ve got a bit of food too.’ Out of her rucksack came the leftovers from dinner. ‘I can’t believe you’ve brought all this,’ said Zaynab122. ‘What were you thinking?’ Nalan said, ‘Why, a nice midnight picnic in the graveyard, of course.’
because what was love if it wasn’t nursing someone else’s pain as if it were your own?
late. It seemed to him that he had always been too late for everything. He had to stop hiding, pretending, separating his life into compartments, and find a way to bring his many realities together.
Nalan thought that one of the endless tragedies of human history was that pessimists were better at surviving than optimists, which meant that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.
