Nur Banu Simsek

“Speak not of peoples and laws and
Kingdoms, for the whole earth is
My birthplace and all humans are
My brothers.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran

“About God I could say nothing definitive, of course, but the basic reality of human life stands compellingly against blind determinism.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one’s thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren’t expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane. As”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“She had done what I had challenged myself to do as a doctor years earlier: accepted mortal responsibility for my soul and returned me to a point where I could return to myself.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air