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The Island of Missing Trees QUOTES

The Island of Missing Trees QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " Time is a songbird, and just like any other songbird, it can be taken captive. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

4 " Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. in life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly's wings. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

5 " that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

6 " You don't share a language, you think, and then you realise, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

7 " Love is the bold affirmation of hope. You don't embrace hope when death and destruction are in command. You don't put on your best dress and tuck a flower in your hair when you are surrounded by ruins and shards. You don't lose your heart at a time when hearts are supposed to remain sealed, especially for those who are not of your religion, not of your language, not of your blood. You don't fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet there they were, the two of them. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

8 " 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

9 " Some day this pain will be useful to you. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

10 " I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where there being ends and someone else's starts. With there roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

11 " The world is unfair, said Meryem. "If a stone falls on an egg, it is bad for the egg; if an egg falls on a stone, it is still bad for the egg. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

12 " Wherever there is a war and painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

13 " She was no part of anything. In her unbroken loneliness, she was complete. Never had she felt so exposed, yet si powerful. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

14 " Love is the bold affirmation of hope. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

15 " He knew, even back then, that she was prone to bouts of melancholy. It came to her in successive waves, an ebb and flow. When the first wave arrived, barely touching her toes, it was so light and translucent a ripple that you might be forgiven for thinking it insignificant, that it would vanish soon, leaving no trace. But then followed another wave, and the next one, rising as far as her ankles, and the one after that covering her knees, and before you knew it she was immersed in liquid pain, up to her neck, drowning. That's how depression sucked her in. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

16 " But if you are going to claim, as humans do, to be superior to all life forms, past and present, then you must gain an understanding of the oldest living organisms on earth who were here long before you arrived and will still be here after you have gone. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

17 " An ancient clay tablet read, 'the Babylonian mosquito devil is now in my land; he has slain all the men of my country'. 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

18 " Today, I think of fanaticism – of any type – as a viral disease. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

19 " If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations. "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees

20 " To immigrants and exiles everywhere,
the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless,
And to the trees we left behind,
rooted in our memories ... "

― Elif Shafak , The Island of Missing Trees