" Though books were potentially harmful, novels were all the more
dangerous. The path of fiction could easily mislead you into the cosmos of
stories where everything was fluid, quixotic, and as open to surprises as a
moonless night in the desert. Before you knew it you could be so carried away
that you could lose touch with reality—that stringent and stolid truth from
which no minority should ever veer too far from in order not to end up
unguarded when the winds shifted and bad times arrived. It didn’t help to be so
naïve to think things wouldn’t get bad, for they always did. Imagination was a
dangerously captivating magic for those compelled to be realistic in life, and
words could be poisonous for those destined always to be silenced. "

― Elif Shafak , The Bastard of Istanbul