Istanbul Passage Quotes

“You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“Life is like that, don’t you think? Mostly bad choices. All you can do is keep your balance between them.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“Even with bad choices, there are worse choices.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“You couldn’t fight the next war until you’d lied about the last one.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“We talk about seasons, he thought, as if they repeated, came back, but they don’t. That spring was gone, irretrievable, a picture in an album, faces smiling, unaware of what would happen to them.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“tryst.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“he realized that this visit, all his visits, were really trips to a cemetery, paying respects at the grave, the way they had visited his father’s, flowers in hand, his mother solemn, Leon bored and uncomfortable, not knowing, as he did now, that she wasn’t visiting his father but some younger part of herself, what she used to be.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“Durak,” he said, spitting it. When”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage