My Name is Red

by Orhan Pamuk

Love, however, was a distant and forgotten thing,

When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you’ll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favorite promontories.

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

what’s the actual reason for this animosity toward dogs? Why do you persist in saying that dogs are impure, and cleaning and purifying your homes from top to bottom if a dog happens to enter? Why do you believe that those who touch us spoil their ablutions? If your caftan brushes against our damp fur, why do you insist on washing that caftan seven times like a frenzied woman?

Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.

Now that I’ve reached this age, I know that true respect arises not from the heart, but from discrete rules and deference.

To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn’t treat it as a career.

letter doesn’t communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it.

he’d depict us in the same manner and color: I all in blue, he all in red.

I’ll have you know that my mother said several times, “At least don’t break the boy’s heart.”

Sometimes I’ll say something and realize upon uttering it that it is of my own thinking; but no sooner do I arrive at that realization than I’m convinced the very opposite is true.

“It is indeed important that a painting, through its beauty, summon us toward life’s abundance, toward compassion, toward respect for the colors of the realm which God created, and toward reflection and faith.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

Kazvin

God must’ve wanted the art of illumination to be ecstasy so He could demonstrate how the world itself is ecstasy to those who truly see.

To know is to remember that you’ve seen. To see is to know without remembering.

Allah created this worldly realm the way an intelligent seven-year-old boy would want to see it; what’s more, Allah created this earthly realm so that, above all, it might be seen.

painting is the act of seeking out Allah’s memories and seeing the world as He sees the world.”

“Blindness is a realm of bliss from which the Devil and guilt are barred,”

does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?

If a man resorts to wiles, guile and petty deceptions, it means he’s nowhere near being in love.

Haste delays the fruits of love.

a man who knows how to embrace is a good man—and

The larger and more colorful a city is, the more places there are to hide one’s guilt and sin; the more crowded it is, the more people there are to hide behind.

A city’s intellect ought to be measured not by its scholars, libraries, miniaturists, calligraphers and schools, but by the number of crimes insidiously committed on its dark streets over thousands of years.

Poetry and painting, words and color, these things are brothers to each other, as you well know.”

love is the ability to make the invisible visible and the desire always to feel the invisible in one’s midst.

“It’s not experience of subject matter that makes us masters, it’s never having experienced it that makes us masters.”

What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination.

And when Black and I embraced, well-being flooded the world in the very same manner.

Isn’t lovemaking the best antidote to love?

A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds.

How was it that everybody, without exception, succeeded in dying? It was precisely through this simple desire to pass on.

Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness.

“My dear master, explain red to somebody who has never known red.” “If we touched it with the tip of a finger, it would feel like something between iron and copper. If we took it into our palm, it would burn. If we tasted it, it would be full-bodied, like salted meat. If we took it between our lips, it would fill our mouths. If we smelled it, it’d have the scent of a horse. If it were a flower, it would smell like a daisy, not a red rose.”

I don’t have to tell you how brazen these Istanbul cats get when the locals spoil them.

“To paint is to remember.”

“Could the blind and the seeing ever be equal?”

“All fables are everybody’s fables,”