The Saint of Incipient Insanities Quotes

“Aşık olmak sevgilinin isimlerini kendine mal etmektir, aşkın bitmesi ise isimlerin iadesi. İsimler insanların varoluş kalelerine uzanan köprülerdir. Onlar vasıtasıyla başkaları, hem dostlar hem de düşmanlar parmak ucunda içeri girmenin bir yolunu bulurlar. Birinin adını öğrenmek varoluşunun yarısını ele geçirmektir, gerisi parçalar ve ayrıntılardan ibarettir. Çocuklar bunu ruhlarının derinliklerinde bilirler. Bir yabancı isimlerini sorduğunda içgüdüsel olarak söylemeyi reddetmeleri bundandır. Çocuklar isimlerin gücünü idrak eder ama büyüdüklerinde unutuverirler.”
― Elif Shafak, Araf

“Back in Turkey, he used to be: ÖMER ÖZSİPAHİOĞLU.
Here in America, he had become an OMAR OZSIPAHIOGLU.
His dots were excluded for him to be better included. After all, Americans, just like everyone else, relished familiarity — in names they could pronounce, sounds they could resonate, even if they didn’t make much sense one way or the other. Yet, few nations could perhaps be as self-assured as the Americans in reprocessing the names and surnames of foreigners. When a Turk, for instance, realizes he has just mispronounced the name of an American in Turkey, he will be embarrassed and in all likelihood consider this his own mistake, or in any case, as something to do with himself. When an American realizes he has just mispronounced the name of a Turk in the United States, however, in all likelihood, it won’t be him but rather the name itself that will be held responsible for that mistake.
As names adjust to a foreign country, something is always lost — be it a dot, a letter, or an accent. What happens to your name in another territory is similar to what happens to a voluminous pack of spinach when cooked —some new taste can be added to the main ingredient, but its size shrinks visibly. It is this cutback a foreigner learns first. The primary requirement of accommodation in a strange land is estrangement of the hitherto most familiar: your name.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“Birini gerçekten sevmekten, sonra onu kaybetmekten, yerleşip ister aile, ister ülke, ister evlilik olsun bir yerlere ait olmaktan, hayatın dönüşsüzlüğünden, geriye sardırılamazlığından ve ebedi düşmanı zamanın çizgisel akışından korkuyordu.”
― Elif Shafak, Araf

“After spending one and a half years in America and years of practicing English before that, Abed, for the first time in his life, began to dream in English. Indeed the meaning of every dream might be the fulfillment of a wish. But had Freud lived the life of an expatriate, immigrant, or a humble non-Western Ph.D. student cut off from his native tongue, he might have added to this that at times it’s not mainly the subject per se but the very form of the dream that fulfills that wish. Not the message but the medium. The latter can follow a path of its own and may even blatantly contradict the former. That’s why, that’s how, every so often foreigners in a country wake up from pleasant dreams with a glum feeling as if having lost something (not knowing that particular loss was a wedge of their mother tongue), or from gloomy nightmares with an inexplicable delight as if they had acquired something novel (not knowing that was a boon from the nonnative language). Dreaming in English for the first time is a threshold, a sign of a bigger change on the way, a change that won’t let you be the same person anymore. You wake up in the middle of the night and try to remember, not the theme of the dream but the words with which the story was told to you. You might be surprised to find out that some of those words you do not happen to have learned yet. For dreams, unlike us, are capable of living simultaneously in more time zones than one, and in the terra firma of Morpheus, the past and the future are one and the same.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“When you are a foreigner, you can’t be your humble self anymore. I am my nation, my place of birth. I am everything except me.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“To redress the balance, in measuring what he liked least, he utilized what he loved most: music!
Rather than hours, minutes, seconds, he used albums, songs, and beats. The length of the period between two succeeding things was tantamount to the length of a certain song played over and over again. Basically it was good to be reminded that unlike time, music could always be rewound, forwarded, paused, and replayed. Music was no swollen corpse. It did not glue itself to the one-way current of time heading toward a phony notion of progress. The circular loop of songs eased the burden of the irreversibility of linear time.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“In order to learn what time it was in Turkish, you asked people if they had a “watch.” In order to learn what time it was in English, however, you asked people if they had the “time”. It was as if in the latter you possessed time or at least the possibility of possessing it, whereas in the former, you possessed the means to measure time but never time itself.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“Just like countless newcomers to the new continent before him, he felt simultaneously a foreigner in a foreign land and yet that the place he’d arrived at was somehow not that foreign. What America did to the conventional stranger-in-a-strange-land correlation was to kindly twist it upside down. In other parts of the world, to be a newcomer meant you had now arrived at a new place where you didn’t know the ways and hows, but would probably and hopefully learn most, if not all, in the fullness of time. In coming to America for the first time, however, you retained a sense of arriving at a place not that new, since you felt you already knew most, if not all, there was to know about it, and ended up unlearning your initial knowledge in the fullness of time.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“I guess I envy birds, like many people do. But I envy them in a different way. It’s not their wings that I’m after. I mean, flying can be interesting, but I’m not particularly attracted to that. I envy birds because of their names. We’ve only one name, or maybe two. But birds have hundreds of them. Even a single species of fowl has so many different names.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“True, names are the welcoming bridges to the significant other’s castle of existence, but they are not necessarily the only way to get in or out of there. There might always be, and usually are, some other routes too buried to be noticed at the first glance. Some other names, nicknames, or appellations most definitely from another time and of another consciousness, unofficial, undocumented, unidentified names, part bygone forever, part eternal, each is like a hidden subway in the labyrinth of love through which the beloved can walk away before the lover has even realized her absence. That is how it is with names, the easiest thing to learn about human beings, yet the most difficult to possess.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“Falling in love is an appropriation of the names of the beloved, and so is falling out of love a reappropriation. Names are the bridges to people’s castles of existence. It is via them that others, friends and foes alike, can find a way to tiptoe in. To learn someone’s name is to capture half of her existence, the rest is a matter of pieces and details. Children know this deep down in their soul. This is why they instinctively refuse to answer back when a stranger asks their name. Children comprehend the power of names, and once they grow up, they simply forget.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“Ouaghauogh was a wholesale sound effect for a variety of things.”
― Elif Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities

“Кой е истинският чужденец – този, който живее в чужда страна и знае, че принадлежи на друга, или този, който живее като чужденец в родната си страна и няма страна, на която да принадлежи?”
― Elif Shafak, Светецът на неизбежната лудост

“Многовековна и неостаряваща, тя стои по-високо от тези тривиални проблеми. Отдавна е стигнала края си, но е и безкрайна. Грозна кралица, своенравна алма матер, аморфна утроба, непрестанно попиваща семето на новодошлите, без да бъде осеменена от когото и да е, дом на прогонените, но и непритежавана от никого.”
― Elif Shafak, Светецът на неизбежната лудост

“Home isn’t where it used to be. Home is anywhere you hang your head.”
― Elif Shafak, Светецът на неизбежната лудост

“Снайперистът е във Вашингтон, мамо, аз съм в Бостън... – Не е. Вече не му знаят координатите – предпазливо възрази тя. ”
― Elif Shafak, Светецът на неизбежната лудост