There Was and There Was Not Quotes

“The soul wants to connect, to be heard, and to persuade. But the storyteller, having heard herself so many times before, loses faith in the innate power of her experience or in her ability to convey it.”
― Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

“To be moved by a tragic story that had happened to someone, anyone, was natural. It was another thing to take that tragedy upon yourself as a kind of catchall for whatever pain and grief your own life had held, to brandish it like a badge of honor--or worse, like a weapon, to take from it a lesson of hatred that only perpetuated the kind of thinking that created such tragedies in the first place”
― Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

“Istanbul is a city laced by three seas: the Marmara, the Bosphorus Strait, and the Black Sea.”
― Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond