My Name is Red

by Orhan Pamuk

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I’d been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

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

All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.

“Wherever the blind miniaturist’s memories reach Allah there reigns an absolute silence, a blessed darkness and the infinity of a blank page.”

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

“They want to be so distinct and different, and they want this with such passion that,” I said, “look, look into the eyes of Death. See how men do not fear Death, but rather the violence implicit in the desire to be one-of-a-kind, unique and exceptional.

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

“Legends and paintings recount how men are distinct from one another, not how everybody resembles one another,”

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

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

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

My beloved Allah please help me. Love isn’t suffering for the sake of suffering, but a means to reach You, is it not?

The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion; if you want to live in that paradise where happy mares and stallions live, open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.

I had the urge to say, “It was Satan who first said ‘I’! It was Satan who adopted a style. It was Satan who separated East from West.”

Men like the mystic Mansur, the wool carder, or the famous Imam Gazzali’s younger brother Ahmet Gazzali, have taken this line of reasoning so far as to conclude in their writings that if the sins I caused are actually committed through God’s permission and will, then they are what God desires; furthermore, they maintain that good and evil do not exist because everything emerges from God, and even I am a part of Him.

It’s not the content, but the form of thought that counts.

“Men like us have no choice but to try to see the world the way God does and to resign ourselves to His justice,”

As we approach God’s vision of the world, His justice approaches us.

An artist’s skill depends on carefully attending to the beauty of the present moment, taking everything down to the minutest detail seriously while, at the same time, stepping back from the world, which takes itself too seriously, and as if looking into a mirror, allowing for the distance and eloquence of a jest.