The Island of Missing Trees Quotes

“Each time Kostas pushed her on the swing, watching her fly away from him, up into the air, laughing and kicking her legs, Ada would shout, ‘Higher, Daddy, higher!’ Struggling with the fear that she might flip over or the metal chains might break off, he would push her harder, and then, as the swing came back, he would have to move out of the way to make space for her. And so it still was, this back and forth, with the father ceding space to his daughter so she could have her freedom.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Time is a songbird, and just like any other songbird, it can be taken captive.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Ali meni je važno i dok god mogu ispričati ovu priču, u nju ću uključiti stvorenja u svom ekosustavu - ptice, leptire, pčele, mrave, komarce i miševe - jer jedno sam naučila: gdje postoje rat i bolna podjela, neće biti pobjednika, ljudskih ili drugih.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Humans lose focus easily. Immersed in their politics and conflicts, they get sidetracked, and that is when diseases and pandemics run rampant.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“He always had an excuse – if a cat wants to eat her kittens, she’ll say they look like mice.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“I once heard Defne say to Kostas, ‘People from troubled islands can never be normal. We can pretend, we can even make amazing progress – but we can never really learn to feel safe. The ground that feels rock hard to others is choppy waters for our kind.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“believe one reason why humans find it hard to understand plants is because, in order to connect with something other than themselves and genuinely care about it, they need to interact with a face, an image that mirrors theirs as closely as possible”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“There was something childlike in the way grown-ups had a need for stories. They held a naive belief that by telling an inspiring anecdote – the right fable at the right time – they could lift their children’s moods, motivate them to great achievements and simply change reality. There was no point in telling them that life was more complicated than that and words less magical than they presumed.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“At night, when the moon shone high above the lemon trees and there was a shiver in the air, of insects invisible to the eye or fairies sent to exile, Kostas would sometimes catch his mother staring at him with a pained expression”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“type – as a viral disease. Creeping in menacingly, ticking like a pendulum clock that never winds down, it takes hold of you faster when you are part of an enclosed, homogenous unit. Better to keep some distance from all collective beliefs and certainties, I always remind myself.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“house windows, offering furtive peeks into other people’s lives, which always seemed less complicated somehow, more exciting – happier.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Trees might not have eyes but we have vision. I respond to light. I detect ultraviolet and infrared and electromagnetic waves. If”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Creeping in menacingly, ticking like a pendulum clock that never winds down, it takes hold of you faster when you are part of an enclosed, homogenous unit.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“I disagree,’ said Defne into her wine glass. ‘There are moments in life when everyone has to become a warrior of some kind. If you are a poet, you fight with your words; if you are an artist, you fight with your paintings … But you can’t say, “Sorry, I’m a poet, I’ll pass.” You don’t say that when there’s so much suffering, inequality, injustice.’ She drained her drink and topped it up. ‘What about you, Kostas? What would you have done?’ He drew in a breath, feeling the weight of her gaze. ‘I don’t know. Until I’m in that situation, I don’t think I can really know.’ A half-smile flickered across Defne’s face. ‘You were always reasoned, logical. A close observer of the marvels of nature and the errors of the human race.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“My father says trees can remember – and he says sometimes young trees have some kind of “stored memory”, like they know about the traumas their ancestors have gone through. That’s a good thing, he says, because the saplings can adjust themselves better.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“As she watched her aunt, suddenly ill at ease and bereft of words, Ada saw for the first time the fragility of the universe the woman had built for herself with her recipes, proverbs, prayers and superstitions. It dawned on her that she might not be the only one who knew so little about the past.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“At night, when the moon shone high above the lemon trees and there was a shiver in the air, of insects invisible to the eye or fairies sent to earth in exile, Kostas would sometimes catch his mother staring at him with a pained expression. He could not help but wonder whether, despite her generous, loving heart, she ever asked herself or the saints she trusted so much why it was her most eloquent, passionate son who had been murdered and why it was her most adventurous, idealistic son who had abandoned home, leaving behind this diffident, distracted middle son she could never quite fathom.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“She fell quiet, trying to grasp how this could keep happening between them, this disorientating slide from affection and love into pure hurt and strife.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“So many times in the past she had suspected that she carried within a sadness that was not quite her own.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“anywhere,”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Possa tu ricordare finché campi.”
― Elif Shafak, L'isola degli alberi scomparsi

“Possa tu non scordare mai”
― Elif Shafak, L'isola degli alberi scomparsi

“È una disgrazia, la memoria lunga. Quando vogliono maledire qualcuno, le anziane cipriote”
― Elif Shafak, L'isola degli alberi scomparsi

“Well, it would have been more accurate if it said, ‘she has slain … ’, as it is the female of the species that causes the carnage, but I guess it’s not the first time women have been written out of history.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Could communities that had still not come to terms with their own extremism ever be ready to acknowledge what they had done to their own dissidents?”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“A tree is a memory keeper. Tangled beneath our roots, hidden inside our trunks, are the sinews of history, the ruins of wars nobody came to win, the bones of the missing.

The water sucked up through our boughs is the blood of the earth, the tears of the victims, and the ink of truths yet to be acknowledged. Humans, especially the victors who hold the pen that writes the annals of history, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting. It remains to us plants to collect the untold, the unwanted. Like a cat that curls up on its favourite cushion, a tree wraps itself around the remnants of the past.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Daca butasul acela din Cipru prindea radacini in Anglia, avea sa fie identic din punct de vedere genetic, totusi deloc acelasi.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“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.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Once it’s inside your head, whether it’s your own memory or your parents’, or your grandparents’, this fucking pain becomes part of your flesh. It stays with you and marks you permanently. It messes up your psychology and shapes how you think of yourself and others.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Legends, perhaps. But legends are there to tell us what history has forgotten.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees