Istanbul: Memories And The City Quotes
"Taking a photograph was always a special occasion. It called for preparation and ceremony."
"Every photograph required a degree of thought and deliberation: 'Does this look right?'"
"In posing for the future, then, we were also enhancing the present."
"Our greatest shortcoming, we felt, was never being as modern as we wanted to be."
"We took and posed for photographs to impress ourselves."
"A photograph supposedly taken to record the truth was in fact no more than a device with which to deceive a pair of eyes in the future."
"Much like the rest of Turkish society, which was self-consciously striving to become more westernized, our family found that our every effort to appear modern and happy seemed to end in frustrating affectedness and hollow ritual."
"The qualities that preserve a photograph’s relevance to future generations transcend the purposes of those who saw the frame and captured it."
"One of the greatest pleasures of looking at old photographs lies in detecting details unintended by the photographer."
"There is an art to viewing a photograph and describing it with imagination and erudition."
"The ideal photography book is one that enables its readers to discover their past anew through images of ordinary streets, objects, and moments in time."
"From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see."
"My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view."
"Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am."
"I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all İstanbullus) making it my own."
"To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world."
"It is resignation that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul."
"To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate."
"It is impossible for me to remember my childhood without this blanket of snow."
"I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions."
"If we see our city in black and white, it’s partly because we know it from the engravings left to us by western artists."
"There is no Ottoman painting that can easily accommodate our visual tastes."
"Ottoman miniaturists took their inspiration from Persians."
"My contemporaries tend to overlook the subtly colored gouaches of imperial Istanbul."
"I love this engraving from an 1839 travel book by Thomas Allom in which night has a metaphorical charge."
"The legendary Salacak murder drew upon the same familiar elements."
"Even today, when I read about murders in Istanbul papers, I still see these scenes in black and white."
"There were things I enjoyed about my illness: My mother treated me even more tenderly."
"If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, melancholy, and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure, and happiness."
"For centuries, it was just a string of Greek fishing villages."
"To be traveling through the middle of a city as great, historic, and forlorn as Istanbul, and yet to feel the freedom of the open sea—that is the thrill of a trip along the Bosphorus."
"The cypress trees, the dark woods in the valleys, the empty and neglected yalıs, and the old weathered ships with their rusty hues and mysterious cargoes."
"A good many writers of earlier generations fell into this habit when writing about Istanbul."
"But when boredom loomed, I would cheer myself up with a game very similar to one I would later play in my novels."
"And sometimes she did. But when she disappeared, they’d give us a reason."
"Most of the quarrels would begin over a meal."
"Hüzün, the Turkish word for melancholy, has an Arabic root."
"Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed."
"To feel this hüzün is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of hüzün."
"So there is a great metaphysical distance between hüzün and the melancholy of Burton’s solitary individual."
"For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West."
"One lesson they’d taken from French culture and French ideas about modern literature was that great writing is original, authentic, and truthful."
"The Istanbul in which they lived was a city littered with the ruins of the great fall, but it was their city."
"In 'The Philosophy of Composition,' Edgar Allan Poe, reasoning along the same cold-blooded lines as Coleridge, wrote that his main concern while composing 'The Raven' was to create a 'melancholic tone.'"
"Their principal constraint in this pursuit was domestic politics—during their youths they had witnessed the fall of the Ottoman Empire."
"I’ll have you know, sir, that I never touch alcohol."
"My grandmother’s authority did not extend beyond the house she patrolled with a large set of keys."
"The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse."
"For one of the achievements of martial law has been to ensure that dolmuşes stop only at their designated stops."
"The rainy season has come, and the umbrellas of the city, God bless them, are out in force."
"But sometimes, looking at my drawing through someone else’s eyes, I’d notice a defect."
"Reşat Ekrem Koçu was one of those _hüzün-_drenched souls who helped create an image of a twentieth-century Istanbul as a half-finished city afflicted with melancholy."
"Koçu was powerless because—like those pure collectors who rate things according to subjective value, not market value—he was sentimentally attached to the stories he spent so many years digging out of newspapers."
"The real subject is Koçu’s failure to explain Istanbul using western 'scientific' methods of classification."
"To see the city with new eyes, these writers had to cleanse themselves of their traditional identities."
"Like most Istanbul Turks, I had little interest in Byzantium as a child."
"You can often tell whether you’re standing in the East or the West, just by the way people refer to certain historical events."
"Neither President Celal Bayar nor Prime Minister Adnan Menderes attended the 500th anniversary ceremony in 1953."
"Until I was ten, I had a very clear image of God; ravaged with age and draped in white scarves, God had the featureless guise of a highly respectable woman."
"God was there for those in pain, to offer comfort to those who were so poor they could not educate their children."
"If you tug at my scarf when I’m praying, your hands will turn to stone!"
"In private life, nothing came to fill the spiritual void."
"It’s entirely possible that I reached this false conclusion by watching the disbelief and mockery with which my family viewed anyone religious enough to pray five times a day."
"The Bosphorus was the key, the heart of the geopolitical world."
"The randomness of these disasters reminded me of the radio maritime announcements, warning all shipping about 'free-floating mines' at the mouth of the Bosphorus."
"The rich spent these parties complaining at length about the food they’d been served on their last plane flight."
"It was the nationalists, then, who insisted on the word 'conquest.'"
"It was not so much the happy prospect of a fun night out; rather, it was the satisfaction of spending the evening with the rich."
"In the early hours of the morning, a ship’s horn will interrupt my sleep."
"I remember well how I just sat there, frozen, my forgotten book in hand."
"If you know how to swim and manage to find your way up to the surface, you’ll notice that, for all its melancholy, the Bosphorus is very beautiful, no less than life."
"Feeling personally responsible for disasters, I had no wish to run away from them and, indeed, felt compelled to get as close as I could, to see them with my own eyes."
"In his spine-tingling Aurelia, or Life and Dreams, Nerval confesses that after his rejection by the woman he loved, he’d decided there was nothing to live for but 'vulgar distractions.'"
"Nerval knew his accounts of customs, views, and eastern women, like his reports of Ramadan evenings, were cheap and coarse."
"The city’s streets are full of women, some of them even alone."
"Gautier, seasoned journalist that he was, took an interest in what his friend had called the city’s 'wings,' venturing into its poorer quarters."
"Until he read the poems in Hugo’s Orientales at the age of nineteen, Théophile Gautier had dreamed of becoming a painter."
"Gautier's eye could find melancholic beauty amid dirt and disorder."
"What happiness do I derive from such confirmations of Istanbul’s hüzün?"
"To some degree, we all worry about what foreigners and strangers think of us."
"The vicious circle is fed by westernizing intellectuals who long to hear the prominent writers and publishers of the West praise them."
"Flaubert, grappling with syphilis, managed to visit Istanbul's brothels."
"What is important for a painter is not a thing’s reality but its shape, and what is important for a novelist is not the course of events but their ordering, and what is important for a memoirist is not the factual accuracy of the account but its symmetry."
"My mother may have had her hand in it too, because, perhaps to make her daily life easier, she turned everything she could into a contest."
"But behind my hopeless fights with my brother was the insistent competitiveness of my heroes, all of whom were committed to winning, coming out on top, however improbable the result."
"Sometimes, when we were alone in the house—giving everything we had to one of our intense battles and dripping with sweat—the bell would ring and, like a husband and wife who’d been caught fighting by neighbors, we’d cut our fevered amusement short."
"The melancholy I itched for—and would later claim—that mood that spoke to me of defeat, obliteration, and degradation, also allowed me a respite from all the rules that needed to be learned, all the mathematics problems that needed to be solved."
"To have been beaten and humiliated was to feel free. There were times when, in spite of myself, I wanted to be beaten, as my brother sensed when he said I was itching for it."
"Sometimes, even when I hadn’t done anything false, I would suddenly see I was a fake."
"Happy people in Europe and America could lead lives as beautiful and as meaningful as the ones I’d just seen in a Hollywood film; as for the rest of the world, myself included, we were condemned to live out our time in places that were shabby, broken-down, featureless, badly painted, dilapidated, and cheap."
"But at the same time that I was living in this world of my own—reading books I shared with no one, painting, acquainting myself with the back streets—I’d also made some evil friends."
"The ease with which I could be good with the good, bad with the bad, and strange with the strange did not produce in me the disaffection I observed in so many of my friends."
"Is this the secret of Istanbul—that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking monuments, and its sublime landscapes, its poor hide the city’s soul inside a fragile web?"
"Why should we expect a city to cure us of our spiritual pains? Perhaps because we cannot help loving our city like a family."
"Here amid the old stones and the old wooden houses, history made peace with its ruins; ruins nourished life and gave new life to history."
"The trouble with Eyüp, where the Kocataş left me, was that this perfect little village at the end of the Golden Horn did not seem real at all."
"The objects I brought back from my aimless walks, my attempts at 'getting lost'—these things were indispensable proof that the walk I’d taken was 'real.'"
"Art, painting, creativity—these were things only Europeans had the right to take seriously, not we who lived in Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century."
"I would keep to this routine for the next twenty years."
"In the end, you’re going to have to find a way to finish university."