The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

But legends are there to tell us what history has forgotten.

A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference. Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.

Arriving there is what you are destined for, But do not hurry the journey at all …

There was something profoundly humiliating yet equally electrifying about hearing yourself scream – breaking off, breaking away, uncontrolled, unfettered, without knowing how far it would carry you, this untamed force that rose from inside.

But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.

People assume it’s a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget. The greater your powers of retention, the slimmer your chances at optimism.

As you aged you cared less and less about what others thought of you, and only then could you be more free.

Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.

Where do you start someone’s story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is death exactly an end?

‘I’m sorry if that’s been your experience, but it’s different with us. Our love is forever.’ Yiorgos said nothing. Only a young person would make such a claim and only the old would recognize its false promise.

Without you, I don’t have a home in this world; I am a felled tree, my roots severed all round; you can topple me with the touch of a finger.

Most of our volunteers are women.’ ‘Why do you think that is?’ ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? What we do here has nothing to do with politics or power. Our work is about grief – and memory. And women are better than men at both.’

in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. In life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly’s wings.

always amazes me that people are terrified of tigers and crocodiles and sharks, not to mention imaginary vampires and zombies, forgetting that their deadliest foe is none other than the tiny mosquito.

But in times of crisis and despair the most unlikely beings can become friends;