Poets From Turkey

"Life is words in action, literature is action in words."

"Enter Love, exit Theory of Love."

"Is sincerity a virtue by itself? A serial killer has also acted sincerely."

"The art of dying is part of the art of living."

"Sociology: A branch of primatology."

"If only procrastination could be postponed!"

"One who doesn’t know law thinks one lives in a jungle. One who knows law knows one lives in a jungle."

"Alexandre the Great was unable to untie the Gordion Knot. He simply cut it."

"You summarise your struggle for 20 years in 20 minutes and your child will remember 2 sentences, which is good."

"If life were enough for vitality, there would be no art."

"An apprentice is a master in dreams. A master is an apprentice even in dreams."

"The process of creative discovery is endless. That’s why “holiness” tends to limit mental vitality and progress by freezing a given work (a life guide) in time, no matter how interpretations differ and even change over the years."

"I write worstsellers. I guess most of my readers are themselves writers. Myself, for example."

"“The child is naked!” said the King. “Which one isn’t?” asked a mother, “Except your own children!”"

"I do not remember any other term when the force that had captured the political power in this country had become so vulgar as it is today, so corrupt, and so hypocritical; when the legal system had been so downtrodden, deteriorated, collapsed and turned into a means of cruelty."

"Creativity is a hidden gem. Education is needed to uncover it."

"A poem is a living organism."

"The poet should be responsible to the poem."

"In the most affirming places of their love Suddenly they grew tired, out of breath Little by little they felt the death Of some places left in darkness"

"Once more in that hour of darkness In dark black waters they arise Dark songs pass before their eyes They lie awake gazing into darkness"

"I want to write poetry, I'm bored, disgusted by my habits If I stop thinking and put my hands down perhaps I will have much to say I'm scurrying to the attic like a solitary bug Before you become old and ugly, I must kiss you on the nose"

"I'd make me into a brand new sailor if I were God Maybe there were new things over there It comes from within me to write as though rabid, I'm hungry, do you understand Let the doctors call it what they will Who can know anything best of all What does it mean to know anything best Which religion doesn't grow old"

"Writing poems is perhaps the loveliest deception Later they'll make a picture or something, then go and drink wine"

"Is the truth of tablecloths to be spread? How awful always to take refuge in known words A person should let himself go."

"Gulls into the water, women proudly into the bazaars I was going to write a poem, I was stifling, fed up with old things Eat, my mother says, but they're all things I've grown accustomed to, in the end. Like Camus and — I don’t know — people like that, I'm cracking up Everything will begin when it untangles itself from your hair"

"Death, one experiences alone Love is a two-person thing"

"I've learned some things from having lived: If you're alive, experience largely, merge with rivers, heavens, cosmos For what we call living is a gift given to life And life is a gift bestowed upon us"

"Distant lands should draw you, people you don't know To read every book, know other's lives, you should be burning You shouldn't exchange for anything the pleasure of a glass of water No matter how much the joy, your life should be filled with yearning"

"To your utmost, listen to every beautiful song As though filling all the self with sound and melody One should plunge head-first into life As one dives from a cliff into the emerald sea"

"A person can gaze at the sky for hours Can gaze for hours at a bird, a child, the sea To live on the earth is to become part of it To strike down roots that won't pull free"

"I've learned some things from having lived: If you're alive, experience one thing with all your power Your beloved should be worn out from being kissed And you should drop exhausted from the smelling of a flower"

"They were eyes, that while gazing on the world Rendered it brilliant with meaning They were eyes, that embraced me with glances They were eyes, for which I now hopelessly long"

"By 1516, Ottoman forces had seized Damascus, and in the following year they entered Egypt, shattering the Mamluk forces by the use of Turkish cannon. Having thus closed the spice route from the Indies, they moved up the Nile and pushed through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, countering the Portuguese incursions there. If this perturbed Iberian sailors, it was nothing to the fright which the Turkish armies were giving the princes and peoples of eastern and southern Europe. Already the Turks held Bulgaria and Serbia, and were the predominant influence in Wallachia and all around the Black Sea; but, following the southern drive against Egypt and Arabia, the pressure against Europe was resumed under Suleiman (1520–1566). Hungary, the great eastern bastion of Christendom in these years, could no longer hold off the superior Turkish armies and was overrun following the battle of Mohacs in 1526—the same year, coincidentally, as Babur gained the victory at Panipat by which the Mughal Empire was established. Would all of Europe soon go the way of northern India? By 1529, with the Turks besieging Vienna, this must have appeared a distinct possibility to some. In actual fact, the line then stabilized in northern Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire was preserved; but thereafter the Turks presented a constant danger and exerted a military pressure which could never be fully ignored. Even as late as 1683, they were again besieging Vienna."

"The Ottoman padishahs (emperors), also known as sultans, were initially a dynasty of and golden extraordinarily dynamic conquerors. The succession demanded a large number of heirs, cages who were produced by a numerous harem of potential mothers of future sultans. However, once a padishah had succeeded, this multitude of princes was a constant threat to his throne, a problem new sultans increasingly solved by murdering all their brothers. Troublesome harem girls or princesses who interfered too much in politics were killed also. In the East, it was forbidden to shed royal blood and thus from Mongolia to the Bosphorus, princes were killed by being suffocated, crushed in carpets by horses or elephants, or strangled with a bowstring. The girls were sown up in sacks and dropped into the Bosphorus. When Suleiman the Magnificent was informed by his favourite wife, the blonde Slavic Roxelana, that his own son Mustafa had been plotting against him, he summoned the prince and watched as he was asphyxiated before him. A similar fate befell one of Roxelana’s sons, Bayezid, after he betrayed the sultan and briefly took up with the Persian shah; Bayezid’s four sons were despatched in the same way."

"The Ottoman Empire was, of course, much more than a military machine. A conquering elite (like the Manchus in China), the Ottomans had established a unity of official faith, culture, and language over an area greater than the Roman Empire, and over vast numbers of subject peoples. For centuries before 1500 the world of Islam had been culturally and technologically ahead of Europe. Its cities were large, well-lit, and drained, and some of them possessed universities and libraries and stunningly beautiful mosques. In mathematics, cartography, medicine, and many other aspects of science and industry—in mills, gun-casting, lighthouses, horsebreeding—the Muslims had enjoyed a lead. The Ottoman system of recruiting future janissaries from Christian youth in the Balkans had produced a dedicated, uniform corps of troops. Tolerance of other races had brought many a talented Greek, Jew, and Gentile into the sultan’s service—a Hungarian was Mehmet’s chief gun-caster in the Siege of Constantinople. Under a successful leader like Suleiman I, a strong bureaucracy supervised fourteen million subjects—this at a time when Spain had five million and England a mere two and a half million inhabitants. Constantinople in its heyday was bigger than any European city, possessing over 500,000 inhabitants in 1600."

"The green of my garden, my sweet sugar, my treasure, my love who cares for nothing in this world. My master of Egypt, my Joseph, my everything, the queen of my heart's realm. My Stanbul, my Karaman, my land of the Roman Caesars, My Badakhshan, my Kipcak, my Baghdad, and Khorasan. O my love of black hair with bow-like eyebrows, with languorous perfidious eyes. If I die you are my killer, O merciless, infidel woman."

"The people think of wealth and power as the greatest fate, But in this world, a spell of health is the best state. What men call sovereignty is worldly strife and constant war; Worship of God is the highest throne, the happiest of all estates."

"It's this way: being captured is beside the point, the point is not to surrender."

"Today is Sunday. For the first time they took me out into the sun today. And for the first time in my life I was aghast that the sky is so far away and so blue and so vast I stood there without a motion. Then I sat on the ground with respectful devotion leaning against the white wall. Who cares about the waves with which I yearn to roll Or about strife or freedom or my wife right now. The soil, the sun and me... I feel joyful and how."

"This earth will grow cold, a star among stars and one of the smallest, a gilded mote on blue velvet— I mean this, our great earth. This earth will grow cold one day, not like a block of ice or a dead cloud even but like an empty walnut it will roll along in pitch-black space... You must grieve for this right now —you have to feel this sorrow now— for the world must be loved this much if you're going to say "I lived"..."

"At eighteen you don't think about memories, you tell them."

"At eighteen you sleep without memories."

"At eighteen the heart shoots like a pebble from a slingshot and the head doesn't sit on the shoulder."

"Looking at this insolent earth, you hear the first battle cry of our species- trap it under a rock and together, screaming, attack and destroy it, as if killing a mammoth."

"You're my bondage and my freedom, my flesh burning like a naked summer night, you're my country. Hazel eyes marbled green, you're awesome, beautiful, and brave, you're my desire always just out of reach."

"Welcome baby, It's your turn to live, They lie in wait for you, chicken pox, whooping cough, smallpox, Malaria, TB, heart disease, cancer, and so on. Unemployment, hunger, and so on. Train wrecks, bus accidents, plane crashes, work accidents, Earthquakes, floods, droughts, and so on. Heartbreak, alcoholism, and so on. Nightsticks, prison doors, and so on. They lie in wait for you, the atom bomb, and so on. Welcome baby, It's your turn to live. They lie in wait for you, socialism, communism, and so on."

"All I wrote about us is lies All I wrote about us is the truth"

"Because of you, each day is a melon slice smelling sweetly of earth Because of you, all fruits reach out to me as if I were the sun. Thanks to you, I live on the honey of hope. You are the reason my heart beats. Because of you, even my loneliest nights smile like an Anatolian kilim on your wall. Should my journey end before I reach my city, I've rested in a rose garden thanks to you. Because of you I don't let death enter, clothed in the softest garments, and knocking on my door with songs calling me to the greatest place."

"Separation isn't time or distance it's the bridge between us finer than silk thread sharper than swords"

"The world's not run by governments or money but people rule a hundred years from now maybe but it will be for sure."