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10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
Elif Shafak
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Grief is a swallow,' he said. 'One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.”
“Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child’s body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the eyes of an outsider.”
“Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you, her heart countered. Sometimes where you feel most safe is where you least belong.”
“We must do what we can to mend our lives, we owe that to ourselves – but we need to be careful not to break others while achieving that.”
“Nalan thought that one of the endless tragedies of human history was that pessimists were better at surviving than optimists, which mean that, logically speaking, humanity carried the genes of people who did not believe in humanity.”
“What was love if it wasn't nursing someone else's pain as if it were your own?”
“She was a foreigner and, like all foreigners, she carried with her the shadow of an elsewhere.”
“If there was a God up there, He must be laughing His head off at a human race capable of making atomic bombs and building artificial intelligence, but still uncomfortable with their own mortality and unable to sort out what to do with their dead. How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything.”
“The possibility of an immediate and wholesale decimation of civilisation was not half as frightening as the simple realisation that our individual passing had no impact on the order of things, and life would go on just the same with or without us.”
“Her mother had once told her that childhood was a big, blue wave that lifted you up, carried you forth and, just when you thought it would last forever, vanished from sight. You could neither run after it nor bring it back. But the wave, before it disappeared, left a gift behind – a conch shell on the shore. Inside the seashell were stored all the sounds of childhood.”
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Book Keywords:
death, grief, mortality
