The Museum of Innocence

The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 1014-16  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 03:34 AM

“Which of you didn’t want to?” asked Füsun. “Her or you?” As curiosity consumed her, compassion gave way to desperation, and her expression, which a moment ago was saying, Please tell me the truth, now was pleading, Please tell me a lie. Don’t hurt me.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 50 | Loc. 1072-76  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 03:37 AM

It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure. Already, every evening, before going to bed, I would take the raki from the refrigerator and gaze out the window as I drank a glass alone in silence. Our apartment was at the top of a tall building opposite Teşvikiye Mosque, and our bedroom windows looked out on many other families’ bedrooms that resembled ours; since childhood I had found strange comfort in going to my dark bedroom to look into other people’s apartments.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 1099-1102  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 03:39 AM

Apart from our measureless lovemaking with childlike abandon, what was it that bound me to her? Or else why was I able to make love to her with such passion? Did the pleasure of satisfying our ever-renewing desire give birth to love, or was this sentiment born of, and nurtured by, other things as well? During those carefree days when Füsun and I met every day in secret, I never asked myself such questions, behaving only like a child greedily gulping one sweet after another.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 1179-84  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 03:45 AM

Rightfully inferring jealousy—though she thought it had to do with the singer’s fame—she told me tenderly (but with obvious pleasure) that she had not been in love with anyone since the age of sixteen, and then she made a pronouncement that shocks me still. Although she, like most girls, enjoyed the perpetual celebration of love in magazines and television and songs, she didn’t regard the subject fit for idle talk, and was convinced that people exaggerated their feelings just to appear superior. For her, love was something to which one devoted one’s entire being at the risk of everything. But this happened only once in a lifetime.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 1219-22  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 03:48 AM

If the intrinsic evidence of love is to have one’s lover or the object of one’s affections in mind at all times, then I was truly on the verge of falling in love with Füsun. But inside me was a coolheaded rationalist saying my inability to stop thinking about Füsun was because of all those other men. When it occurred to me that jealousy might be an even more definitive sign of love, my reason (however frantic) concluded that this was merely a transitory manifestation.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1434-35  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 04:02 AM

To embrace, to kiss—it felt so much more genuine than any contemplation of the impasse to which we had come, so full of the irresistible power of the present moment.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1437-41  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 04:02 AM

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now,” even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1444-47  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 04:03 AM

But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1539-42  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 04:08 AM

As for all those rich married women who had slept with no one in their lives but their husbands, or at the most taken a lover in shame and secrecy, never with much satisfaction—when they saw this Belkıs openly courting the most eligible bachelors, to say nothing of her secret married lovers, they were so jealous they would have found a way to drown her in a spoonful of water, given the opportunity.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1650-54  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:09 AM

Some people spend their entire lives in pain, owing to the misfortune of being poor, stupid, or outcast from society—this thought passed through me, gliding by with the measured pace of the coffin, then disappeared. Since the age of twenty I had felt myself protected by an invisible armor from all variety of trouble and misery. And so it followed that to spend too much time thinking about other people’s misery might make me unhappy, too, and in so doing, pierce my armor.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1624-35  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:10 AM

Below the gate to the Teşvikiye Mosque courtyard, in the shaded area where women gathered as if by instinct, I’d seen Füsun among the covered women and the society women who, for the occasion, had draped chic, fashionable scarves over their heads, and at that moment, my heart had begun to race. She was wearing an orange scarf. As the crow flies there were seventy, perhaps eighty meters between us. She was breathing, she was frowning, her soft skin was perspiring slightly in the midday heat; annoyed by the crowd of covered women pressing against her, she was biting her lower lip, shifting the weight of her slender body from one foot to the other—of course, I did not just see all these things, I felt them inside me. I longed to cry out to her from the balcony and wave, but as in a dream I had no voice, and my heart continued to pound. “Mother, I have to go.” “Ah! What’s come over you? Your face is deathly white.” On the street I watched her from afar. Şenay Hanım was next to her. As she listened in to her employer’s conversation with a potential if not actual customer, a stocky but stylish woman, she ran her fingers over the ends of the scarf she had tied so awkwardly under her chin. The scarf had endowed her with a proud and sacred beauty.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1806-48  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:55 AM

For a time we were silent. “Don’t misunderstand me, my child, I’m not saying I made sacrifices so that you could be happy. In fact, of course, she was the one who really wanted marriage. I kept her dangling for years. I just couldn’t imagine life without her, and when I couldn’t see her I suffered enormously. But there was no one to share my pain with. Then one day she said, ‘Make up your mind!’ Either I left your mother and married her, or she was going to leave me. Pour yourself some raki.” There was a silence. “When I refused to leave you boys and your mother, she left me,” said my father. To admit this exhausted him, but it also relaxed him. When he looked at my face and saw that he could go on confiding in me, he became more relaxed still. “I was in pain, great pain. Your brother had married, and you were in America. But of course I tried to hide my anguish from your mother. To steal into a corner like a thief and suffer in secret—that was another agony. Your mother had sensed the existence of this mistress, just as she had with the others; understanding that something serious was going on, she said nothing. Your mother, and Bekri and Fatma Hanım—we lived together like a cast of characters imitating a happy family in a hotel room. I could see that I would find no relief, that if it carried on this way I would go mad, but I couldn’t bring myself to do what was necessary. At the same time, she”—my father never said her name—“was suffering just as much. She announced that an engineer had proposed marriage and that if I didn’t decide soon, she was going to accept. But I didn’t take her seriously…. I was the first man she had ever been with. I thought she could not possibly want anyone else, that she must be bluffing. Even when I doubted my reasoning and started to panic, I was still paralyzed. So I tried just not to think about it. You remember that summer when Çetin drove us all to Izmir, to the fair…. When we got back I heard that she had got married, but I couldn’t believe it. I was convinced she had just put the news out to get my attention, and make me suffer. She refused my every attempt to see her, even to speak with her; she wouldn’t answer the phone. She even sold the house I’d bought for her and moved somewhere I couldn’t find her. Had she really married? Who was this engineer husband? Had she had children? What was she doing? For four years I couldn’t ask anyone these questions. I feared the answers I might get, but to know nothing was agony, too. To imagine her living in another part of Istanbul, opening the papers to read the same news, watching the same TV programs, yet never to see her—it left me desolate. I began to feel as if life itself was futile. Please don’t misunderstand me, my son—I certainly felt proud of you, and the factories, and your mother. But this suffering was unimaginable.” Because he’d been using the past tense, I sensed that the story had reached some sort of conclusion, and that my father had found some relief in his confession, but for some reason this displeased me. “In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and one afternoon I rang her mother. The woman certainly knew all about me, but of course she didn’t recognize my voice. I lied to her, passing myself off as the husband of one of her girl’s lycée classmates. ‘My wife is ill and it would boost her spirits if your daughter could come to see her in the hospital,’ I said. Her mother said, ‘My daughter is dead,’ and began to cry. She’d died of cancer! I hung up at once so that I wouldn’t cry, too. I wasn’t expecting this, but I knew at once that it was true. She had never married an engineer…. How terrifying life can be, how empty it all is!” When I saw the tears forming in my father’s eyes, for a moment I felt utterly helpless. I understood his pain even as I felt anger, and the more I reflected on the story he had told me, the more my mind became muddled and I behaved as if I were a member of a tribe an old-fashioned anthropologist might describe as “primitive” and unable to think about its own taboos. “So anyway,” my father said, pulling himself together after a short silence, “I didn’t bring you here just to upset you with tales of all my woes. But you’re about to get engaged, so it’s fitting for you to know your father better. But there is something else I want you to know. Can you understand?” “What is it?” “What I feel now is only remorse,” said my father. “I never paid her enough compliments, and I would give anything to be able to tell her a thousand times over what a charming, precious person she was. She truly had a heart of gold, a lovely, modest, utterly enchanting girl…. She wasn’t like other beauties I’ve seen here. She never flaunted it, as if her loveliness were her own doing; she was never demanding, never expected gifts or flattery. You see, it’s not just that I lost her; it’s also that I know I didn’t treat her as she deserved—that’s why I still suffer. My son, you must know how important it is to treat women well—but now, not later, not when it is too late.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 1917-25  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:43 AM

At parties in the evenings Sibel did not rest from her day’s calculations and only too happily regaled friends with impressions of the new neighborhoods, discussing our plans with others, apartment locations, their advantages and drawbacks; whereas I, feeling oddly constrained by shame, would change the subject, talk to Zaim about football, the success of Meltem soda, or the new bars, clubs, and restaurants that had just opened for the summer. My secret bliss with Füsun had made me more subdued in the company of friends, and more and more I preferred to watch the goings-on from the sidelines. Sorrow was slowly consuming me, though at the time I couldn’t see it clearly, recognizing it only now, so many years later, as I tell this story. Then I noticed only that I had become more “quiet,” as others were noting, too. “You’ve been pensive lately,” said Sibel late one night as I was taking her home in the car. “Really?” “We haven’t exchanged a word for half an hour.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1941-46  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:45 AM

At times like this what matters is not our words but our demeanor, not the magnitude or elegance of our grief but the degree to which we can express fellowship with those around us. I sometimes think that our love of cigarettes owes nothing to the nicotine, and everything to their ability to fill the meaningless void and offer an easy way of feeling as if we are doing something purposeful. My father, my brother, and I each took a cigarette from the packet of Maltepes offered to us by the elder son of the deceased, and once they were all lit with the same burning match that the teenager artfully offered us, there followed a strange moment when all three of us crossed our legs and set about puffing in unison, as if enacting a ritual of transcendental importance.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1964-66  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:46 AM

As the day of the engagement party drew near, we would embrace more forcefully, even perspiring more profusely, each wrapping arms and legs around the other, in the manner of longtime lovers who, when reunited, are desperate to close even the least space between them; and then we would lie there, quiet and still, as we watched the tulle curtains flutter in the breeze entering through the door.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1969-79  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:48 AM

Though in the early days we’d also refrained from discussing what was to become of us, there had nevertheless been no end of cheerful chatter, about our relatives in common, and evil men, and everyday Nişantaşı gossip. Now we were saddened to see our carefree days had ended so quickly. We felt the loss, a kind of unspoken misery. But the dreadful ache did not drive us apart—in a strange way it brought us closer together. I sometimes caught myself thinking that I would be able to continue seeing Füsun after the engagement. This heaven, in which everything would go on as before, slowly evolved from a fantasy (let’s call it a dream) into a reasonable hypothesis. If she and I could be this passionate, this generous, making love, then she could not possibly leave me, or so I reckoned. In fact, this was my heart talking, not my reason. I was hiding these thoughts even from myself. But in one part of my mind I was paying close attention to Füsun’s words and actions, hoping they might tell me what she was thinking. Because Füsun was well aware of this scrutiny, she gave me no clues, and so the silences grew longer still. At the same time she was watching what I did, and making her own desperate calculations. Sometimes we would stare at each other like spies trying to probe each other’s secrets.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1992-2001  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:49 AM

“I think about you so much that there’s no room in my mind for mathematics,” she said, laughing self-mockingly, as if what she’d said meant nothing, as if it were a stock phrase taken from a film, but then she turned deep red. Had she not blushed so deeply, and betrayed such sorrow, I would have gone along with the joke. We would have acted as if it hadn’t occurred to either of us that this was the day of my engagement party. It wasn’t that way, though. An overwhelming and unbearable sorrow weighed down on both of us that no amount of joking and no amount of distracting talk could assuage; we understood that even sharing the misery would not make it lighter, that the only escape from it was making love. But the melancholy inhibited our lovemaking and finally tainted it. At one point Füsun lay stretched out on the bed, as if she were a patient listening to her pain, and watching mournful clouds pass overhead. I stretched out beside her and joined her in looking at the ceiling. The children playing football outside had gone quiet, and all we could hear was the ball being kicked around. Then the birds stopped singing, until there was nothing to hear. Then, in the distance, a ship blew its horn, and then another.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 2005-13  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:50 AM

As always, we kissed each other gracefully, having become so proficient in this art. Instead of pulling you into our melancholy, let me say that it felt as if Füsun’s mouth had melted into mine. As our kisses grew ever longer, a honeyed pool of warm saliva gathered in the great cave that was our mouths combined, sometimes leaking a little down our chins, while before our eyes the sort of dreamscape that is the preserve of childish hope began to take form—and we surveyed it as if through a kaleidoscope. From time to time, one of us would, like a ravenous bird taking a fig into its beak, suck upon the other’s upper or lower lip, as if about to swallow it, biting the imprisoned lip, as if to say, “Now you’re at my mercy!” and having enjoyed this adventure of lips, and the frisson of being at someone else’s mercy, and awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one’s lips but of one’s entire body to a lover’s mercy, we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 2075-76  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:54 AM

“Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy,” said my father as he watched the three beauties. “But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2161-64  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:01 AM

As the smells of aftershave and brilliantine (applied with particular liberality on the thinning hair of men over forty), the ladies’ heavy perfumes, the clouds of cigarette smoke to which everyone contributed, more out of habit than for pleasure, the odor of cooking oil from the kitchens—as the confluence of odors swirled into the spring breeze, I was reminded of being a child at my parents’ parties.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 2186-90  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:03 AM

Sibel and I were so excited, and the former foreign minister so distracted, that we got into a hopeless muddle about which ring went where. But by now the guests were ready for a laugh, and so when a few people cried out, “Not that finger, it goes on the other hand,” a general titter circulated through the crowd, until the rings finally found their proper places, and then the former foreign minister cut the ribbon binding them, to a spontaneous round of applause sounding like a flock of pigeons taking flight.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 2441-45  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:27 PM

No sooner had I taken my seat next to Berrin than the image of Füsun fired up in my mind’s eye with full force, as if a television set had just been plugged in. But this time the light from that image exuded joy, not sadness, illuminating not just this evening but my entire future. For a brief moment I recognized myself among those men whose real source of happiness is their secret lover, but who pretend it is their wives and children—I, too, was acting as if it was Sibel who made me happy, and we weren’t even married yet.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 2633-34  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:41 PM

The orchestra going without pause from one number to the next was now playing a slower, more soulful tune. At the table there was a silence, a very long one, and I could feel jealousy’s venom mixing with my blood. But I did not wish to acknowledge this.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2712-18  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:46 PM

So as not to inflame the other ambitious Satsat employees, I jotted down a note in my father’s name and gave it to Mehmet Ali, a waiter who’d known us since the time the hotel had first opened, instructing him to pass it to Kenan at the next pause in the music. At that moment, my mother reached out and tried to grab my father’s raki, saying, “You’ve had enough,” and in the tussle, spilled some on his tie. They were serving ice cream in glasses when the Silver Leaves took a break. In those days, we would all enjoy a cigarette before each new course. The bread crumbs, the tumblers smeared with lipstick, the stained napkins, overflowing ashtrays, lighters, dirty plates, and crumpled cigarette packets all fired painful sensations in my muddled mind that the evening’s end was fast approaching.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 2761-66  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:49 PM

Charmed by her solicitude, I took Sibel to the dance floor, and the moment we got there I knew I had made a mistake. The Silver Leaves were playing “A Memory from That Summer,” which called to mind the previous summer, when Sibel and I had been so happy, and as the music evoked these memories with arresting force—just as I hope the exhibits in my museum are doing—Sibel embraced me as if for the first time. How I wanted in return to embrace with the same ardor my fiancée, the one with whom I was to share the rest of my life. But I could think only of Füsun. Because I was trying to catch a glimpse of her in the crowd, because I did not want her to see me in a warm embrace with Sibel, I held myself back.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2776-78  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:50 PM

“I’ve worked out something love has in common with a good newspaper column, Kemal Bey,” he said. “What is it?” I asked. “Love, like a newspaper column, has to make us happy now. We judge the beauty and power of each by how deep an impression it makes on the soul.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2788-99  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:52 PM

As Sibel and Zaim began to dance, with obvious reluctance, Füsun and I looked for a moment into each other’s eyes. Then I put my hand on her waist and with a few gentle turns, moved her as far away as I could, like any elated suitor preparing to abscond with his sweetheart. How to describe the peace that came over me the moment I took her in my arms? The noise of the crowd that had so addled me, the ungodly racket that I had taken to be the aggregate of the silverware, the orchestra, and the roar of the city—now I knew what I’d heard was only my disquiet at being far from her. Like a baby who will stop crying only in the arms of one particular person, I felt a deep, soft, velvety bliss of silence spreading through me. From her expression I could see that Füsun felt the same; taking the enveloping silence as our mutual recognition of shared enchantment, I wished that the dance would never end. But soon I realized that her half of the silence meant something altogether different from mine. Füsun’s silence harked back to the question I had brushed off earlier as a joke (“What will become of us?”), and now I had to give an answer. I decided that this was what she had come for. The interest that men had shown her this evening, the admiration that I’d seen even in the eyes of the children—all this had given her confidence, had lightened her suffering. Now she might even be able to view me in perspective, as a “passing fancy.” As I began, in my drunkenness, to realize that the night was coming to an end, I was seized by the terrifying thought of losing Füsun.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 2800-2804  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:52 PM

“When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one,” I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. “Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest, most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them. Trust me that after tonight I’ll stop all this, I’ll sort this out. Are you listening to me?” “I’m listening.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 2860-67  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:56 PM

“I could tell from the way the coffee cup was rattling that my lost friend Necdet was in enormous pain. It was rattling as if it had a life of its own, and I felt that Necdet must be trying to tell me something. Then suddenly the coffee cup went still…. Everyone said that this person must have died at that very moment…. How could they have known?” “How did they know?” asked Sibel. “That same night I was at home and looking through my drawers for a missing glove, and I found a handkerchief that Necdet had given me as a present many years before. Maybe it was a coincidence. But I don’t think so. I learned a lesson from this. When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead, we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something … I don’t know … even an earring.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2888-95  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 12:58 PM

She swallowed and fell silent, and I feared she was going to cry. But she pulled herself together, and with a frown she recited the speech that she must have rehearsed at home. “For me, it’s not in the least important whether something is or isn’t a European product. And it’s not in the least important to me either if a thing is genuine or fake. If you ask me, people’s dislike of imitations has nothing to do with fake or real, but the fear that others might think they’d ‘bought it cheap.’ For me, the worst thing is when people care about the brand and not the thing itself. You know how there are some people who don’t give importance to their own feelings, and care only about what other people might say”—here she glanced in my direction. “This handbag will always remind me of tonight. I congratulate you. It’s been an evening I’ll never forget.” She rose to her feet, and as she squeezed our hands, my darling girl kissed us each on the cheek.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2923-29  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:19 PM

Every day I went to the Merhamet Apartments at the customary hour, to begin my wait. Having realized that getting there early only aggravated my pain, I resolved not to arrive before five minutes to two. I would go into the apartment trembling with impatience, and during the first ten or fifteen minutes hopeful anticipation would ease the pain, an excitement wreathing my head down to the tip of my nose even as my heart ached and my stomach cramped. From time to time I would part the curtains to look down at the street and inspect the rust on the lamppost in front of the entrance, and then I’d tidy the room a bit. I would listen to footsteps passing one floor below, and from time to time I would hear high heels clicking past in that decisive way of hers. But they would continue on without slowing down, and I would realize with pain that the woman who had entered the building, lightly shutting the door behind her in such a familiar way, was in fact someone else.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2930-35  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:19 PM

me to accept that Füsun was not coming that day. As I paced the rooms, glancing out the windows, stopping in my tracks from time to time, standing motionless, I would listen to the pain sluicing within me. As the clocks in the apartment ticked away, my mind would fixate on the seconds and the minutes to distract itself from the agony. As the appointed hour neared, the sentiment “Today, yes, she’s coming, now” would bloom inside me, unbidden, like spring flowers. At such moments I wanted time to flow faster so that I could be reunited with my lovely at once. But those minutes would never pass.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2962-66  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:22 PM

Despite all its tangible manifestations, I knew that the pain emanated from my mind, from my soul, but even so I could not bring myself to cleanse my mind and deliver myself from it. Inexperienced in such feeling, I was, like a proud young officer ambushed in his first command, forced into a mental rout. And it only made matters worse that I had hope—with every new day, new dreams, new reasons that Füsun might appear at the Merhamet Apartments—which by making the agony bearable prolonged it.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 3035-44  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:27 PM

European—I had to muffle my mournful beating heart, pitifully crying, Füsun, Füsun, Füsun. We piled into two cars and moved on to Belgrade Forest, to a green field overlooking Bentler and offering much the same view as this one painted 170 years ago by the European artist Melling, and here we spread out a déjeuner sur l’herbe. I remember lying down on the grass toward noon and gazing up at the bright blue sky. Sibel and Zaim were busy trying to set up an old swing from the Persian gardens with new ropes, and I remember how struck I was by her grace and beauty. At one point I played the children’s game Nine Stones with Nurcihan and Mehmet. As I inhaled the sweet smell of grass and the cool breeze coming from the lake behind Bentler, redolent of pine and roses, I thought that the wondrous life before me was a gift from God, thought how all this beauty had been bequeathed to me unconditionally; how colossally stupid—and perhaps sinful—it was to let it be poisoned by these pangs spreading from my stomach to every part of my body. I still felt shamed that the pain of not seeing Füsun had reduced me to this, and that with my self-confidence undermined, I succumbed to jealousy.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 3077-81  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:30 PM

FORTY-FIVE minutes later Füsun still had not come, and I was lying on the bed like a corpse, though in pain and intensely aware of it, like an animal listening helplessly to its last breath. The pain was deeper and harsher than anything I had felt until that day, afflicting every part of me. I felt that I should get out of bed, distract myself, look for a way out of this predicament, or at the very least this room, and these sheets and pillows that still carried her scent, but I just couldn’t summon the will.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 3089-95  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:31 PM

As I gave myself over to the pain, as acid-filled grenades exploded in my blood and bones, I sorted through my bundle of memories, one by one, distracting myself, briefly and intermittently, sometimes for ten or fifteen seconds, though sometimes for only one or two, until these same memories would propel me even deeper into the void of the present moment, the pain stunning me as if for the first time, a heretofore unknown magnitude of agony. One palliative for this new wave of pain, I discovered, was to seize upon an object of our common memories that bore her essence; to put it into my mouth and taste it brought some relief. There were those nut and currant crescent rolls to be found at all the patisseries of Nişantaşı in those days, which I’d bring to our rendezvous, because Füsun liked them so much.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 3110-16  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:32 PM

Toward five o’clock, still in bed, I remembered how, after my grand-father died, my grandmother changed not just her bed, but her bedroom in order to withstand her grief. With all my will, I resolved to extract myself from this bed, this room, and these objects that had aged so beautifully, that were so heavy with the fragrance of happy love, each one murmuring, creaking, rustling of its own accord. But I could not help doing the opposite, and embracing these objects. Either I was discovering the astonishing powers of consolation that objects held, or I was much weaker than my grandmother. The joyful shouts and curses of the children playing football in the back garden bound me to that bed until nightfall. It was only that evening, after I had downed three glasses of raki, and Sibel phoned to ask me about my cut, that I realized it had long since stopped bleeding.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 3117-23  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 08:32 PM

Thus I continued to visit the Merhamet Apartments every day at two o’clock in the afternoon, until the middle of July. As the pain I felt while wondering whether Füsun might come grew less intense each day, I sometimes convinced myself that I was slowly growing accustomed to her absence, but there was no truth to this, none at all. It was simply that I was growing more adept at distracting myself with the happiness I found in objects. A week after the engagement party, she still occupied my every thought, and though these thoughts were not always overwhelmingly urgent, though I sometimes managed to banish them to the back of my mind, the sum total of my agony—to speak arithmetically—was not diminishing; against every hope, it was continuing to grow. It was almost as if I was going to the apartment so as not to lose the habit, or the hope of seeing her.
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- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 3149-51  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:10 PM

Drinking was my sole defense, albeit temporary, against jealousy. When I woke up the next morning with a headache and my envy refreshed, I realized, with growing panic, that the pain was not abating, and that I felt more helpless than ever.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 3151-59  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:10 PM

As I walked to Satsat (Inge still smiling saucily at me from the Meltem poster on the side of the apartment), and later that morning, as I tried to bury my thoughts in paperwork, I was forced to acknowledge that the pain was gradually increasing, and that, far from forgetting Füsun as time wore on, I was thinking about her ever more obsessively. Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness. How I longed to think about her just a little less, and to believe that I would, in time, forget her! There was hardly a moment when I wasn’t thinking about her; in truth, with few exceptions, there was not a single moment. These “happy” interludes of oblivion were fleeting—a second or two—but then the black lamp would be relit, its baleful darkness filling my stomach, my nostrils, my lungs, until I could barely breathe, until merely to live became an ordeal.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 3301-6  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:20 PM

In these moments of unbearable longing, I would leave Sibel to play ball in the sea with Zaim, and walk off into the distance to lie down in the sand, leaving my awkward body, love-starved into senselessness, to be scorched by the sun. Watching the sand and the shore from the corner of my eye, I would, inevitably, see a girl running toward me and think that it was her. Why had I not once brought her to Kilyos Beach, knowing how much she’d have wanted to go? How could I not have recognized the value of this great gift God had given me! When was I going to see her? As I lay there in the sun, I wanted to cry, but knowing I was guilty, I couldn’t allow myself, and instead I buried my head in the sand, and felt damned.
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- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 3308-14  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 09:21 PM

LIFE HAD receded from me, losing all the flavor and color I’d found in it until that day. The power and authenticity I’d once felt in things (though, sad to say, without fully realizing it) was now lost. Years later, when I took refuge in books, I found, in a work by Gérard de Nerval, the best expression of the crude dullness I was feeling at that time. After understanding that he has lost forever the love of his life, the poet, whose heartbreak eventually leads him to hang himself, writes somewhere in his Aurélia that life has left him with nothing but “vulgar distractions.” I, too, felt that whatever I did during these days without Füsun, it was vulgar, ordinary, and meaningless, and toward persons and things that had led me to such coarseness I felt only anger.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 3388-90  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:19 PM

BUT INSTEAD of Füsun I saw Sibel. My pain was now so great, so all-consuming that when the office emptied out, I knew at once that if I remained by myself for too long I would feel as lonely as this dog after the Soviets sent him off in his little spaceship into the dark infinity of outer space. By
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- Highlight on Page 184 | Loc. 3640-47  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:39 PM

There was beauty to behold in the world, that was all there was to it: the summer night was cooled by the north wind blowing off the Bosphorus, rustling the leaves of the plane trees in the courtyard of the Teşvikiye Mosque, and causing them to whisper in that lovely soft way I remembered from childhood; and at nightfall the swallows were screeching as they swooped over the dome of the mosque and the rooftops of the 1930s apartment buildings. As the sky grew darker still, I could begin to see the flickering lights of television sets in the homes of those who had not fled the city for the summer, among them a bored girl on one balcony and, sometime later, on another balcony, an unhappy father, gazing absently at the traffic in the avenue below. But as I watched all this listlessness, I felt as if I were watching my own feelings, and I was frightened by the thought that I might never be able to forget Füsun.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 3679-84  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:42 PM

Sibel and Nurcihan went through the rest of my mother’s things with drunken ceremony, while Mehmet sat on the bed (in just the place where my father would sit in the morning, staring absently at his toes before putting on his slippers), gazing at Nurcihan with love and admiration. He was so very happy, having, for the first time in years, fallen head over heels in love with a woman he could marry, and it seemed to come as a shock to him, as if he were ashamed of being that happy. But I did not envy him, because I sensed an overwhelming fear of being deceived—the ever-lurking possibility that things would come to a bad and degrading end—and regret.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3693-98  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:44 PM

Just then, Mehmet’s car took off, its tires squealing, before skidding to an abrupt halt, going into reverse, and stopping again; the door opened, and Nurcihan stepped out of the car, calling up to us on the sixth floor that she had left behind her silk scarf. Sibel ran inside, and in no time brought the scarf out to the balcony, and threw it down to the street. I shall never forget standing there with Sibel on my mother’s balcony, watching the purple scarf’s slow descent, as it swayed like a kite in the light breeze, opening and closing, puffing up and twisting. This is my last happy memory of my fiancée.
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- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 3707-12  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:45 PM

“Where were you actually, yesterday afternoon?” she asked. But she regretted the question at once, adding sweetly, “If you think this is going to be embarrassing for you later on, if you don’t want to tell me, then don’t.” She lay down next to me on the bed, pawing me like an affectionate kitten, with such compassion but trepidation, too; sensing that I was about to break her heart, I felt ashamed. But the djinn of love had escaped Aladdin’s lamp and was prodding me, telling me that I could no longer keep this secret to myself.
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- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 3757-60  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:48 PM

We had breakfast in the sitting room, which after the party looked like a war zone, at the table where my parents had sat across from each other for more than thirty years. Here I display an exact replica of the loaf I bought from the grocery store across the street. Its function is sentimental, but also documentary, a reminder that millions of people in Istanbul ate no other bread for half a century (though its weight did vary) and also that life is a series of repeated instances that we later assign—without mercy—to oblivion.
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- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 3806  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 10:55 PM

by now the pain of love was caused not so much by Füsun’s absence but by the more abstract prospect of agony without end.
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- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 3877-85  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:01 PM

“They’re resorting to trickery just to make a bit of loose change,” I said. “It’s not worth thinking about.” “There’s more than a bit of loose change at stake—this could be quite lucrative, you know, or your brother wouldn’t bother. You shouldn’t sit by and let them exclude you, or deny you your share. You have to stand up to them, challenge them.” “I don’t care what they do.” “I don’t like this attitude,” said Sibel. “You’re letting everything go, you’re withdrawing from life; it’s almost as if you enjoy being ground down. You have to be stronger.” “Should we order two more?” I said, lifting my glass with a smile.
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- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3903-10  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:03 PM

I made my usual solemn assurances—that these difficult days would pass, that in addition to two sons, I was hoping we’d have three daughters who would look just like her. We were going to have a big, wonderful, happy family; we would have years and years of laughter, and lose none of the pleasures of life. To see her radiant face, to listen to her thoughtful words, to hear her working in the kitchen—these things gave me no end of joy, I told her, and made me glad to be alive. “Please don’t cry,” I said. “At this point, it doesn’t seem to me as if any of these things could ever come true,” said Sibel as the tears began to flow faster. She let go of my hand, picked up her handkerchief, and wiped her eyes and her nose; then she took out her compact and dabbed a great deal of powder under her eyes. “Why have you lost faith in me?” I asked.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 3980-85  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:10 PM

It was clear that strict regimens and prohibitions had been useless, though we still enjoyed living together in this once grand, now crumbling yali. However hopeless our situation, there was something about this decrepit house that bound us together and made our pain bearable by endowing it with a strange beauty. The yali added gravity and historical depth to this doomed love of ours; our sorrow and defeat were so great that the vestigial presence of a vanished Ottoman culture could furnish what we had lost as old lovers, as a newly engaged couple. The world evoked protected us somehow from the pain we felt at being unable to make love.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 4041-48  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:16 PM

When I embraced Sibel in farewell and saw tears in her eyes, I became afraid, thinking that there would be no return to our old life after this, sensing I would not see her again for a very long time, and then I chided myself for taking such a dark view of things. On the way back in the car, Mehmet, for whom this would be the first separation from Nurcihan in many months, broke the long silence: “Life is just so empty, isn’t it, without the girls.” That night the yali indeed felt so empty and sad that I couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t just the creaking floorboards: Now that I was alone, I discovered that the sea itself was invading the old frame, each time moaning a new tune. The waves crashing against the concrete terrace made a very different noise than those that hit the rocks, and the murmuring currents hissed past the boats tethered below.
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- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 4071-72  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:18 PM

As I scoured every neighborhood, every street of the city, it never crossed my mind that I would recall the hours I spent hunting for her as happy ones.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 4087-93  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:20 PM

Even if I managed to shake him off, Mehmet would track me down at whatever club I went to afterward, and his eyes shining, he would go on and on about what Nurcihan had said to him that day on the phone. When Sibel rang me, I would panic, for I had nothing to say to her. There were times, I admit, when I longed for the consolation of Sibel’s embrace, but I was so guilt-ridden, so worn down by my evil duplicity, that ultimately her absence was a comfort. Relieved of the pretenses that our situation demanded, I became convinced that I had returned to my old self. As my old self, though troubled, I would wander through the city’s old neighborhoods, looking for Füsun, cursing myself for having neglected to seek out these charming streets, these old neighborhoods, much sooner. And I regretted not having broken off with Sibel before our engagement, or not finding a way to break off the engagement afterward, before it got to be too late.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 4100-4104  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:21 PM

Chasing vodka with beer, I sat there with the other men watching television, and before long—it wasn’t even nine o’clock—I was paralytic. When I went outside I could not even remember where I’d parked my car. I walked for a long time in the rain, thinking more about Füsun, and my life, than about my car, and I remember that as I walked these dark and muddy streets, my dreams of Füsun, painful as they were, still brought me happiness. So it was that in the middle of the night I found myself back at the Fatih Hotel; having secured a room, I was soon asleep.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 209 | Loc. 4111-13  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:21 PM

My hunt for Füsun was a boundless joy, and in the evening I would go content to beer halls to rest my weary legs. But as with so many chapters of my life, I would realize only much later that my days at the Fatih Hotel, far from being painful, as I then imagined, were in fact full of happiness.
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- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4162-68  | Added on Tuesday, December 02, 2014, 11:25 PM

As we sat together at Fuaye, eating lentil soup, Zaim fixed me with an affectionate gaze. “You’ve run away from life. Every day I see you turning into a sadder and more troubled man, so I’m worried about you.” “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m fine….” “You do not look fine,” he said. “Try to be happy.” “You think the point of life is to be happy,” I said. “That’s why you believe I’m not happy and have run away from life…. I’m on the threshold of another life that will bring me peace.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 4270-72  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 11:30 AM

“In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they’re not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it’s about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 4440-46  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 12:03 PM

To readers and museum visitors who are curious to know whether the pain I endured that day was owing to the death of my father or to Füsun’s absence, I would like to say that the pain of love is indivisible. The pains of true love reside at the heart of our existence; they catch hold of our most vulnerable point, rooting themselves deeper than the root of any other pain, and branching to every part of our bodies and our lives. For the hopelessly in love, the pain can be triggered by anything, whether as profound as the death of a father or as mundane as a piece of bad luck, like losing a key; such elemental pain can be flamed by any sort of spark. People whose lives have, like mine, been turned upside down by love can become convinced that all other problems will be resolved once the pain of love is gone, but in ignoring these problems they only allow them to fester.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 4446-55  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 12:04 PM

Sitting in the taxi on the day we buried my father, I was able to think these thoughts clearly, but to my regret I could not act accordingly. The anguish of love had disciplined me—brought me to maturity—but in ruling my mind, it gave me scant latitude to use the reason that maturity had brought me. A man like me, too long captive to a destructive passion, will continue on the course his reason tells him is wrong, even if he knows it will bring him to sorrow; in time, he’ll see only more and more clearly how wrong was his path. In such situations there is an interesting phenomenon rarely remarked upon: Even on our worst days, our reason does not stop speaking to us; even if unequal to the power of our passion, it continues to whisper with merciless candor that our actions will serve no purpose but to heighten our love, and therefore our pain. During the first nine months after I lost Füsun, my reason continued to whisper to me, ever more urgently, giving me the hope that one day it would usurp control of my mind and rescue me. But love mingled with such hope (even the simpler hope that I would one day live without pain) gave me the strength to carry on in the face of my agony, while at the same time prolonging it.
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- Highlight on Page 240 | Loc. 4711-20  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 12:20 PM

I now understood as an elemental fact of life that while I was here, inside my body was a soul, a meaning, that all things were made of desire, touch, and love, that what I was suffering was composed of the same elements. Between the howling of the rain and the gurgling of the water pipes, I heard one of the old Turkish songs that, in my childhood, would make my grandmother so happy whenever she heard it. There had to be a radio nearby. Between the low moan of the lute and the joyous chatter of the kanun was a tired but hopeful female voice, coming to me through the bathroom’s half-open window, saying, “It’s love, it’s love, the reason for everything in the universe.” With the help of this singer, I thus lived through one of my life’s most profoundly spiritual moments standing in front of the bath-room mirror; the universe was one, and one with all inside it. It wasn’t just all the objects in the world—the mirror in front of me, the plate of cherries, the bathroom’s bolt (which I display here), and Füsun’s hairpin (which I thankfully noticed and dropped into my pocket)—all humanity was one, too. To understand the meaning of this life, one first had to be compelled to see this unity by the force of love.
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- Highlight on Page 242 | Loc. 4756-62  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 12:25 PM

After a year of suffering, it had also been salubrious to see Füsun one last time: The love I felt for her was owing not to her beauty or her personality; it was nothing more than a subconscious reaction to Sibel and the prospect of marriage. Though never having read a word of Freud, I recall appropriating the concept of the subconscious, widely bandied about in newspapers, to make sense of my life at that time. Our forebears had djinns that drove them to action against their will. And I had my “subconscious,” which had driven me not just into a year of such suffering on account of Füsun, but also now to embarrassment in ways I could never have imagined. I could no longer be its dupe; I needed to turn over a new leaf in my life, and forget everything to do with Füsun.
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- Highlight on Page 255 | Loc. 5003-5  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:07 PM

Sometimes I would feign being in higher spirits than she was; I could never tell her, even in jest, that her attempts to arrange a marriage for me were pointless, and so I would still listen intently to her detailed reports on the girls she had investigated on my behalf.
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- Highlight on Page 257 | Loc. 5032-37  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:10 PM

My answer would be that I was worn out after the loss of our father and the awkward ending of my engagement to Sibel—and left feeling a bit introverted. It was a very hot July evening when I told him that I wished to be alone with my grief, and I could see from Osman’s face that he saw this as a form of madness. It seemed to me that, for now at least, my brother was willing to tolerate this as a species of severe depression; but if my affliction got any worse, he would find himself caught between embarrassment and the agreeable prospect of seizing permanent control of our business dealings through the pretext of my incapacity. But I was only afflicted by such anxieties if I’d seen Füsun very recently; if a longer time had elapsed since I’d last seen her, and I was racked with the pain of her absence, my thoughts would be only of her.
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- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 5089-95  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:14 PM

Because his wife had been raped, Orhan the fisherman did not make love with her—he kept his distance. When she understood that her pain would not be assuaged by this marriage, Müjde attempted suicide; Orhan took her to the hospital and saved her. The most emotional scene was on the way back from the hospital, when he told his wife to take his arm, and Müjde turned to him and asked, “Are you ashamed of me?” It was then that I finally felt an intimation of the shame that had remained buried inside me. The crowd had fallen into a deathly silence, aghast at the shame of marrying and walking arm in arm with a woman who had been raped, her virginity stolen. My own shame was compounded by anger. Was I embarrassed that virginity and chastity were being discussed so openly, or because I was watching this with Füsun?
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5108-12  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:16 PM

Füsun’s arm was no longer close to me. When Orhan Gencebay told his sweetheart, “May happiness be yours, and may the memories be mine!” someone at the front yelled “You fool!” but almost no one laughed approval. We were all silent. That was when it occurred to me that the lesson this country had learned or yearned to learn, above all others, the skill we most wanted to master and pass along, was that of gracefully accepting defeat.
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- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 5189-5200  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:22 PM

At the end of the summer, in the Arnavutköy Çampark Cinema, while watching Little Lady, about a spoiled rich girl’s adventures with the chauffeur who brings her to her senses, our arms brushed against each other that way, and remained intensely in contact as the fire of her skin ignited mine, and until my body reacted with an entirely unexpected elation. So transported was I by the dizzying sensation that for a time I paid no attention to arresting my body’s impudence, and so when the lights came on, and the five-minute intermission began, I was obliged to hide my shame by draping my navy pullover over my lap. “Shall we get some soda?” said Füsun. At the interval she usually went with her husband to buy soda and pumpkin seeds. “Sure, but give me a moment, would you?” I said. “I just had a thought I’m trying to remember.” Just as I had done as a lycée student, whenever I needed to hide my body’s importune excitement from my classmates, I raced through memories of my grandmother’s death, the real and imaginary funeral rites of my childhood, the times when my father had scolded me, and then I imagined my own funeral, the grave terrifyingly dark, my eyes filled with earth. Half a minute later I was ready to stand up without betraying myself.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 269 | Loc. 5254-56  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:26 PM

Because so many languages describe the condition I was in as “heartbreak,” let the broken porcelain heart I display here suffice to convey my plight at that moment to all who visit my museum. The pain of love no longer manifested itself as panic, hopelessness, or anger, as it had done the previous summer. By now it had become a more viscous substance that coursed through my veins.
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- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 5280-86  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:28 PM

When he noticed me with the bottle against my lips as we drove back in the car, Feridun, quite unaware of my conversation with his wife, said, “This Meltem soda is great stuff, isn’t it, brother?” I told him that the soda wasn’t “genuine” Meltem, from which he deduced the scheme and felt compelled to comment: “In the backstreets of Bakırköy there’s a secret propane-filling depot. They fill Aygaz canisters with cheap cooking gas. We bought it, too, once. Brother Kemal, please believe me when I tell you—the fake burned better than the real thing.” I brushed the bottle against my lips with care. “This one tastes better, too,” I said.
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- Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 5339-41  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:32 PM

Over time, the persona I assumed in her presence came to supplant my true self. It must have been then I first came to realize that for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile, a narrow path of lies, punishment, and repression.
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- Highlight on Page 275 | Loc. 5377-81  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:34 PM

The days I didn’t see her became harder and harder to endure. Once again I was in thrall to the dark, dense anguish that had held me captive for a year. I was terrified of making a mistake for which my punishment would be never to see Füsun again. To keep this from happening, I had to ensure that Füsun did not see the extent of my visceral pique. So now the weapon I’d fashioned of my anger was turned inward, punishing me alone. An indignant and broken heart is of no use to anyone. By continuing to take offense, I was hurting only myself.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 280 | Loc. 5477-83  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 09:41 PM

For the sake of any readers who are amazed that I could visit Füsun and her family (it seems so clinical to call them the Keskins) for eight years, and who wonder how I can speak so breezily about such a long interval—thousands of days—I would like to say a few words about the illusion that is time, as there is one sort of time we can call our own, and another—shall we call it “official” time?—that we share with all others. It is important to elaborate this distinction, first to gain the respect of those readers who might think me a strange, obsessed, and even frightening person, on account of my having spent eight lovelorn years trudging in and out of Füsun’s house, but also to describe what life was like in that household. Let me begin with the big clock on the wall: It
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 292 | Loc. 5698-5704  | Added on Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 11:58 PM

When something important was on television while there was still something cooking on the stove, Aunt Nesibe would send Füsun in to check it in her place. As Füsun darted between the kitchen and the dining area, which was just next door, carrying plates and pots, she would pass right between me and the television screen. As her mother and father lost themselves in some film, or quiz show, or weather report, or the tirade by some angry general of ours who had just staged a coup, or the Balkan Wrestling Championship, or the Manisa Mastic Festival, or the ceremony marking the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Akşehir, I would watch my beauty pass back and forth in front of me, as though she was not, as her parents might have seen it, blocking the view, but rather was the view itself.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 293 | Loc. 5712-16  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:00 AM

During the last minutes before the curfew, as Çetin drove quickly through the dark and fast-emptying streets, the torment of insufficiency would feel as keen as that of total deprivation. I would feel the pain of not having seen enough of Füsun. Even now, all these years later, whenever I read in the papers of the military’s displeasure with the state of the nation, the evil of military coups I remember most vividly is that of rushing home denied my due ration of Füsun.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 295 | Loc. 5765-71  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:03 AM

Late at night, when I had sunk into the cushions on the L-shaped divan, the raki I had drunk with Tarık Bey would make itself felt, and I could almost drop off to sleep, watching the television screen with one eye open, and with the other it was as if I were looking into the depths of my soul; I would feel the shame I had at other times succeeded in banishing, the shame that life had brought me to such a strange place, and an anger would well up urging me to get on my feet and leave the house. It was not uncommon for me to feel this way on those dark, dire nights when Füsun’s expressions had displeased me, when she had offered hardly a smile, and even less if I brushed against her, intending nothing, but having done so, requiring a sign of assurance.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 5785-93  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:05 AM

Füsun whispered that she had followed me into the room to find out what I was up to back there. Her casual curiosity moved me, and for a time we stood together in the dark, side-by-side at the window, looking out at the street. At that moment I came close to grasping what it was that kept me coming to the Keskin house for eight years: I was driven by the very question that lay at the heart of what it meant to be a man or a woman in our part of the world. In my view, Füsun left the table that evening because she wanted to be close to me. This was clear from the way she stood by me in silence, gazing at what was to her a very ordinary view. But for me, as I cast my eyes upon the roof tiles, and the tin roofs, and the smoke puffing gently from the chimneys, as I peered through lit windows, catching glimpses of families moving about their homes—it all seemed extraordinarily poetic, simply because Füsun was at my side, and the desire was great to put my hand on her shoulder, to wrap my arms around her, or just to touch her.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 306 | Loc. 5961-64  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:19 AM

The need to see Füsun had so fogged my mind that I never examined the logic by which the payments expunged the disgrace. But I remember sitting with my mother in front of the television in Nişantaşı around suppertime one evening in the spring of 1977, yet again caught between desire and shame, doubled up in my father’s chair (now mine), paralyzed by indecision, for half an hour, unable to move.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 309 | Loc. 6010-33  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:23 AM

But having seized on such a pretext, I had locked myself into a need to be off once the program was over. So at that moment, the television having been turned off, I would sit for a casual while longer, before telling myself, more forcefully now, that I needed to stand up and get going, but my legs would not obey me. In this motionless state I would remain, whether at the table, or on the L-shaped divan, like a figure in a painting, and as I felt the perspiration beading on my brow, many Aristotelian moments would pass, the ticking of the clock punctuating my discomfort, as I exhorted myself, saying, “I’m standing up now!” forty times over, but still to no avail. Even all these years later this inertia baffles me somewhat, just as I cannot fully comprehend the love that so afflicted me, though I can adduce, perfectly, any number of discrete reasons for my apparent loss of will: 1. Every time I said, “I must get going now,” Tarık Bey or Aunt Nesibe would say with sincerity, “Oh, please stay a little longer, Kemal Bey, we were sitting so nicely!” 2. If they did not, Füsun might give me an enchanting smile, with such a mysterious air that I would be all the more confused. 3. Then someone would begin telling a new story, or bring up a new subject. To get up now, before this new story was told, would be rude, I told myself, and so I would sit there, however uneasily, for twenty minutes more. 4. Coming eye to eye with Füsun I would lose all sense of time, until finally glancing at my watch I’d see that forty, not twenty, minutes had passed, and then I’d say, “Oh, look at the time,” but I still wouldn’t go: I’d just sit there, cursing myself for being so weak, my inertia and shame growing ever deeper, until the moment arrived when it became too heavy to bear. 5. I would search my mind for an excuse to sit there just a bit longer, to give myself a little respite from that burden before going. 6. Tarık Bey might have poured himself another rakı, in which case courtesy perhaps required that I should join him. 7. I would try to ease my departure by using the feeble excuse of waiting for midnight, and then saying, “Oh, it’s midnight already, I really should be going.” 8. I would tell myself that Çetin was perhaps in the middle of some conversation at the coffeehouse, and that he might not be ready either. 9. And anyway, down in the street, just beyond the door, a group of neighborhood youths were gathered, smoking and blabbing, so to leave just then would make me the object of their idle gossip.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 310 | Loc. 6038-49  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:25 AM

It was far more comforting to explain Feridun’s lack of concern by reference to taboos and traditions. Living as we did in a country where it was unthinkable to show interest in a married woman in front of her parents, and where especially among the poor, and in the provinces, even a sidelong glance could lead to death, it would have been virtually inconceivable to Feridun that it might cross my mind to flirt with Füsun every night as we sat watching television like a happy family. The love I felt, like the dinner table at which we ate, was ringed with so many refinements and prohibitions that even if every fiber in me shouted that I was madly in love with Füsun, we would all be obliged nevertheless to act “as if” there was an absolute certainty that such a love could simply not exist. At times when this occurred to me I would understand that I was able to see Füsun not in spite of all these exquisite customs and proscriptions, but because of them. Let me offer a counterexample by way of elucidation, as it is central to my story: Had we been living in a modern Western society with more candid relations between men and women, and with the sexes not living in separate realms, my going to the Keskin household four or five times a week would, of course, force everyone eventually to accept that I was coming to see Füsun. The husband would have to be jealous and would be obliged to stop me. And so in such a country my visits could never be so frequent, and neither could my love for Füsun have taken this shape.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 314 | Loc. 6119-24  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:32 AM

The moment Feridun walked through the door, I would at once feel superfluous, out of place in this world, like something I’d seen in a dream, but unable to give up my stubborn wish to belong to it. I shall never forget Feridun’s expression one night in March 1977, when the late news on television had been an endless succession of stories about bombs detonated at political meetings and coffeehouses and leaders of the opposition shot in cold blood; it was very late (in my shame I’d stopped looking at my watch), and he arrived to find me sitting there. It was the sad look of a good man who felt genuine concern for me, but also tinged with an element of his nature that so mystified me—an innocence, so light and good and hopeful as to accept everything as normal.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 315 | Loc. 6134-36  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:33 AM

One night, having navigated the macabre darkness and the deserted, half-lit avenues, I reached home safely, and after I had poured myself one last raki before heading for bed, I pleaded to God to return me to normal life. I cannot say if I really wanted this prayer to be answered.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 316 | Loc. 6147-54  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 12:34 AM

A day or two following such a triumph, when I next went to their house for supper and saw Füsun, I would understand with great clarity two of the things that drew me there: 1. When I was far from Füsun, the world troubled me; it was a puzzle whose pieces were all out of place. The moment I saw her, they all fit back together, reminding me that the world was a beautiful, meaningful whole where I could relax. 2. Anytime I entered the house of an evening and our eyes met, it was like a conquest. In spite of everything, and no matter what had happened to dash my hopes and my pride, there was the glory of being here once more, and most of the time I saw the light of the same happiness in Füsun’s eyes. Or so I would believe, and, convinced that my stubbornness, my resolve had made an impression on her, I would find my life’s beauty was restored.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 322 | Loc. 6260-61  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:04 AM

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory—of this there is no doubt.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 335 | Loc. 6509-13  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:21 AM

In the summer of 1977 we cajoled Tarık Bey into joining us as well, and as he warmed to the idea, the entire team of television-watching Keskins would head out to eat on the Bosphorus, with Çetin at the wheel. I would like every visitor to our museum to find these outings as pleasant as I did, so I shall go into some detail here. After all, isn’t the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 341 | Loc. 6642-46  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:29 AM

As the north wind blew, and a ship’s searchlight swept through the night, lighting up the choppy waves, Füsun carried on smoking, as if nothing had happened. I looked into her eyes for the longest time, and not once did she look away. There was something challenging, almost haughty, about the way she looked at me; I was suddenly aware that the change she had undergone over the past two years was far bigger and more dangerous than this little trouble we’d had with some drunken actor—and so were her expectations.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 344 | Loc. 6688-95  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:33 AM

It was perhaps because of having spent part of my youth in America that it took me so long to understand what it meant for the sexes to come eye to eye in a world like ours, where tradition dictated that a woman should never meet or come to know a man outside her family circle. It wasn’t until my thirties, when I’d met Füsun…. But when I’d discovered this reality I knew the worth of what I’d then come to understand, and how deep these currents were. The look Füsun gave me was the look women gave in the old Persian miniatures, and now to be observed in the love scenes and photoromans of the day. When I was sitting across from her at the table, my attention was not on the television but on reading the looks that beauty cast in my direction. Perhaps because she’d discovered how much pleasure I derived from the exchange and wanted to punish me, but whatever the reason, after a time, whenever our eyes met, Füsun’s eyes would dart away, as if she were some shy young girl.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 345 | Loc. 6699-6713  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:35 AM

If no one was paying attention to us as we ate supper, and having given ourselves over to television, we had been moved to tears by the spectacle of lovers in some sentimental series saying their last farewells, a chance meeting of our eyes would bring me great joy, and I would have gladly acknowledged having gone there that evening just to look into her eyes. But Füsun would pretend not to notice the happiness of that moment; she would avert her gaze, and this would break my heart. Did she realize that I was there because I could not forget how happy we’d been together, once upon a time? Eventually I came to feel that she understood from my expressions that I was immersed in such thoughts, and feelings of hurt. Or perhaps I was just imagining this. This ambiguous realm in the cleft between the felt and the imagined was my second great discovery under Füsun’s tutelage in the intricate art of exchanging glances. Of course, staring was the only way to communicate when there were no words. Everything that was expressed, everything that was to be understood, though, was deeply rooted in an ambiguity we found entrancing. If I’d been unable to understand something Füsun had meant to say with her look, in time I would come to see that the thing the look meant to express was the look itself. There were, at first, those rare moments when a deep and powerful emotion registered on her face, and, sensing her anger, her determination, and her stormy heart, I would be thrown into confusion, feeling as if the ground had shifted beneath my feet. But later, when something on television evoked the happy memories we shared—for example, a couple kissing as we had once done—and my attempt to catch her eye was met with her looking away, and even turning her head, I would become enraged. Out of such emotion did I master the habit of staring at her insistently, stubbornly, without blinking.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 345 | Loc. 6713-17  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:36 AM

I would gaze straight into her eyes and study her carefully, as if there were all the time in the world. Of course, at the dinner table these looks of mine could never last longer than ten or twelve seconds, with my boldest attempt persisting for half a minute. Modern generations may well consider what I was doing as a form of harassment. Because by my insistent looks I was laying out on her family’s dinner table the intimacy, the love we had formerly shared, and which Füsun now wished to hide, or perhaps even forget.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 346 | Loc. 6723-26  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:36 AM

In his column in Milliyet, the famous columnist Celâl Salik had issued many stern warnings to the angry men who prowl our streets: “When you see a beautiful woman,” he’d said, “please don’t bore into her with your eyes as if intent on murder.” And the thought that Füsun might take my intense staring as proof that I was one of those Celâl had addressed made me burn with further fury.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 347 | Loc. 6754-58  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:38 AM

So it was when in such a mood, late in the evening, at some unexpected moment, I would meet her eye by chance and suddenly I would remember my undying love, and I would bolt upright in excitement, as if having awakened, as if suddenly resurrected. I’d want Füsun to share my elation. For if she could for only a moment awaken as I had from this innocent dream, she would remember the deeper, truer world we’d once inhabited, and in no time she would leave her husband and marry me. But when I saw no such “recollection,” no such “awakening” in Füsun’s eyes, I would be far too dejected to rise from my chair.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 348 | Loc. 6763-66  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 01:39 AM

Years after these events I saw how much Füsun’s indignant glances and the rest of her coded pantomime owed to the expressions of Turkish films. But it was no mere mimicry, for Füsun, like those heroines, was unable to explain her troubles to her mother, her father, or any man, so she channeled all her anger, her desire, and other emotions into those looks of hers, laden with meaning.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 357 | Loc. 6939-44  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 11:20 AM

After drunken evenings like this, as I drifted in and out of sleep, I was beset by painful thoughts: that my youth was well and truly over; that (as was the case for all Turkish men) my life was taking its ultimate shape before I had even reached the age of thirty-five; that I would—could—never again know great happiness. At times, remembering the love and longing that filled my heart, I would console myself thinking that if my future seemed darker with each passing day, this could only be an illusion induced by the political assassinations, the never-ending street battles, the spiraling prices, and the bankruptcies that filled the news.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 359 | Loc. 6970-72  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 11:22 AM

As these objects accumulated, so did the manifest intensity of my love. Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 364 | Loc. 7061-64  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 11:28 AM

My love and my shame had brought me to this place where my only inclination was to turn inward and live in silence. For a week I went to the cinema every night: I went to the Site, the Konak, and the Kent and saw American films. Especially in a world as miserable as ours, the point of films is not to offer verisimilitude but a different new universe to amuse us and make us happy.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 365 | Loc. 7087-88  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 11:29 AM

And as I read the latest editions, it seemed to me that I was fascinated by the fire because it spoke to me about the disasters in my own life.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 368 | Loc. 7144-50  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 02:44 PM

“Yes, Füsun Hanım,” I said, assuming her father’s contrived manner. “Why don’t you give me my usual rakı, so that I can savor the full happiness of coming home.” Even today I cannot explain why I said this, or what I meant by it. Let us just say that my misery came to my lips. But Füsun understood the sentiment behind the words, and for a moment I thought that she would begin to cry. I noticed our canary in its cage. I thought about the past, and my life, the flow of time, the passing years. We lived through our most difficult moments during those months, those years. Füsun had not risen to stardom, and I had not succeeded in coming any closer to her. Our impasse had become a public disgrace; we’d been humiliated.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 369 | Loc. 7160-66  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 02:45 PM

“I’m so proud of you,” I said, my voice heavy with defeat despite my best efforts. “One day everyone in Paris should see these!” I said. As always, what I really longed to say was something like “My darling, I love you so much, and oh, how I’ve missed you. It was so painful being far away from you, and what bliss this is, to see you!” But it was as if the painting’s flaws had become the flaws of the world in which we lived, and it was while examining the dove painting, sadly noting its simplicity, innocence, and lack of sophistication, that I understood this. “It’s turned out beautifully, Füsun,” I said carefully, inside me nursing a deep pain.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 369 | Loc. 7169-71  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 02:46 PM

We looked at the views of the city that served as backgrounds for Füsun’s paintings of Istanbul birds, but far from lifting my heart, this exercise brought me sorrow. We loved our world very much, we belonged to it, and that meant we ourselves were part of the picture’s innocence.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 370 | Loc. 7180-87  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 02:55 PM

As with so many other things on exhibit in my museum, whenever I held any of these matchboxes back at the Merhamet Apartments, I was able to relive the pleasure of sharing a table with Füsun, and gazing into her eyes. But even before that, whenever I dropped a matchbox into my pocket, pretending not to notice what I had done, there was another reason to rejoice. I may not have “won” the woman I loved so obsessively, but it cheered me to have broken off a piece of her, however small. To speak of “breaking off” a piece of someone is of course to imply that the piece is part of the worshipped beloved’s body. But three years on, every object and person in that house in Çukurcuma—her mother, her father, the dining table, the stove, the coal carrier, the china dogs on the television, the bottles of cologne, the cigarettes, the rakı glasses, the sweets bowls—had merged with my mental image of Füsun.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 371 | Loc. 7193-96  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 02:55 PM

Years later, when I fell in with Istanbul’s weird and obsessive collectors; when I visited their houses packed to the rafters with paper, rubbish, boxes, and photographs, every time trying to understand how these soul mates of mine felt about their soda bottle caps or pictures of film stars, and what meaning a new acquisition held—I would remember how I’d felt every time I took something from the Keskins’ house.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 376 | Loc. 7285-89  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:02 PM

“Were you really worried the dog was lonely up there, Kemal Bey?” said Aunt Nesibe. “What a curious man you are. But that’s why we love you.” Füsun was smiling tenderly at me. “I get upset to see things thrown away and forgotten,” I said. “They say the Chinese used to believe that things had souls.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 378 | Loc. 7330-44  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:05 PM

“Is this thing yours, sir?” “Yes.” “What is it then, brother?” Again I fell silent, surrendering to despair—a new symptom of paralysis; I wanted this soldier, this brother of mine, to understand the wrong I had done without my telling him, but it wasn’t to be. I’d had a classmate in primary school who was odd and rather stupid. Whenever the teacher called him up to the blackboard to ask if he’d done his math homework, he would fall silent just as I had done now, refusing to say yes or no; so weighed down was he by guilt and failure that he could only stand there, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, until the teacher went mad with fury. What I did not understand as I watched him with such amazement in that classroom was that if a person were to fall into such a silence even once, it would never again be possible for him to open his mouth; he would remain silent for years, even centuries. When I was a child, I was happy and free. But that night on Sıraselviler Avenue, so many years later, I discovered what it meant to be unable to talk. I had already had intimations that my passion for Füsun would ultimately turn into such a story of stubborn introversion. My love for her, my obsession, or whatever one could call it—it had rendered me incapable of diverting myself onto a path that would lead me to sharing this world freely with another. Even in the early days I’d known deep in my heart that mutuality could never happen in the world I’ve been describing, and so I’d turned inward, to seek Füsun there. I think that Füsun knew, too, that one day I would find her inside me. In the end everything would be fine.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 381 | Loc. 7381-83  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:07 PM

Having observed the precocious ease with which Feridun had mastered the art of always looking comfortable and taking life’s pleasures as they came, I might at one time have found it hard to understand his moral qualms; but because suffering had caused me to mature beyond my years, I had come to realize that most people are not what they appear.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 386 | Loc. 7487-91  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:15 PM

Sometimes it would occur to me that ours was a companionship of knowing shared defeat: This made me even happier than love did. Whenever I felt this, everything—the shafts of evening sun on the city streets; the odor of dust, age, and mildew wafting from the old Greek apartment buildings; the vendors selling fried liver and pilaf with chickpeas; the football bouncing between the boys playing on the cobblestones; and the mock applause when I recovered a strong ball for them on my way down to the Keskin house—everything in the world made me happy.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 389 | Loc. 7531-34  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:17 PM

Like the cologne the driver’s assistant offered each and every traveler at the beginning of a bus journey, our cologne reminded us that as we gathered around the television we belonged to one another, that we shared the same fate (a sentiment also suggested by the evening news), that even though we were meeting together in the same house to watch television every evening, life was an adventure, and there was a beauty in doing things together.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 389 | Loc. 7543-47  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:19 PM

In the first life that I was now repeating exactly, there had been no great sorrow, nor any great happiness, and a heavy melancholy was blackening my soul. Perhaps this was because I’d seen the end of the story and knew that no great victory or extraordinary bliss awaited me. Six years after falling in love with Füsun, I was no longer someone who thought of life as a pleasurable adventure, indeterminately full of possibility: I was on the verge of becoming a sad and dejected man. I was slowly being overtaken by the fear of having no future.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 390 | Loc. 7552-58  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:19 PM

“I’m just not in the mood tonight,” Füsun would say sometimes, in all honesty. Then I would sense Tarık Bey’s beating heart, and in his longing to protect his daughter, his sadness. It grieved me to think that when she uttered these words, Füsun was talking about not just that night, but about the dead end that was her whole life, and it was then that I decided to stop going to watch the filming of Broken Lives. Füsun’s answer had also served as a reminder of the war she had been waging against me for many years; in Aunt Nesibe’s looks, I could see that she was concerned for me as well as Füsun. The woes and worries of life had blackened our hearts, no less than the dark rain clouds gathering over
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 392 | Loc. 7580-85  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:21 PM

During my first years with the Keskins, Füsun would smoke in a way as if to suggest she was half trying to hide it from her father. Covering her cigarette with the curved palm of her hand, and not using the Kütahya ashtray that her father and I used, but tipping her ashes onto the small saucer of a coffee cup, “without anyone seeing.” Her father and Aunt Nesibe and I were heedless of where our smoke went, but when she had to exhale, Füsun would suddenly turn her head to the right, as if about to whisper a secret into the ear of the classmate sitting beside her, directing the fast cloud of dark blue smoke to a point far from the table. I loved to see her face clouding with guilt, panic, and affected shame: It reminded me of our math lessons, and I believed then that I would love her all my life.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 392 | Loc. 7594-96  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:22 PM

When I was not at the house, Füsun would smoke her cigarettes almost down to the filter, as I could tell from those butts she’d left around the house before I arrived. I always knew which ones were hers, not by the brand but rather by the way she’d stubbed them out, which bespoke her mood.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 393 | Loc. 7608-9  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 03:23 PM

This variety of methods ensured that every cigarette to leave her hand had its special shape, and its own soul. Back in the Merhamet Apartments I would retrieve the butts from my pocket for careful examination, likening each to some other form.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 394 | Loc. 7620-24  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:17 PM

As for this pair of well-crushed butts, I trace one of them back to the evening we saw a film called False Bliss, which aired on television around that time, with our friend Ekrem from the Pelür (better known as Ekrem Güçlü, the famous star who had once played the prophet Abraham) as the hero. Füsun had stubbed out that cigarette just after he had intoned, “The greatest mistake in life, Nurten, is to want more, to try to be happy,” while Nurten, his poverty-stricken beloved, cast down her eyes in silence.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 395 | Loc. 7635-40  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:18 PM

Someone viewing us from afar might take us for a couple enjoying polite conversation in a European country, where men and women could be at ease together; he might imagine us at a party and assume we had retired to a quiet corner to get to know each other better. We would not look into each other’s eyes; we would look through the open window, laughing as we chatted about the film we had just seen on television, or remarked on the oppressive summer heat, or the children playing hide-and-seek in the street below. Just then a light breeze would blow in from the Bosphorus, bringing a strong whiff of seaweed, which blended with the overpowering scent of honeysuckle, the fragrance of Füsun’s hair and skin, and the pleasing smoke from this cigarette.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 395 | Loc. 7643-46  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:19 PM

However, if, as in the case of this specimen, our eyes happened to meet, a charge passed between us, jolting us both, as we remembered at the same time why I was sitting at that table, and her stub would reflect the particular confusion she was feeling, thereby endowing the butt with an unusual shape. Hearing a ship blow its horn from a very great distance, I would then imagine the universe, and my life, as those aboard the ship might view it.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 396 | Loc. 7666-68  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:20 PM

Sometimes Füsun yawned so beautifully that I would think that she had forgotten the entire world and that she was drawing from the depths of her soul a more peaceful life, as one might draw cold water from a well on a hot summer day.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 398 | Loc. 7687-90  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:22 PM

Sometimes the picture on the television would go fuzzy, and Tarık Bey would say, “Could you see what you can do, my girl?” and Füsun would fiddle with a button on the back of the set, while I watched the back of her. Sometimes I would say, “I’ll smoke one more cigarette, and then I’ll go.” Sometimes I would forget Time altogether, and nestle into “now” as if it were a soft bed.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 401 | Loc. 7754-55  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:27 PM

Sometimes I was absolutely positive that life itself wasn’t somewhere else, but right there, at that table.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 402 | Loc. 7770-71  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:28 PM

Sometimes I would say, “Shall we have a look at your painting, Füsun?” and we would go into the back room, and as Füsun and I looked at her painting, I realized this was the time when I was always happy.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 415 | Loc. 8029-35  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:47 PM

“Everyone is honest about this…. Your mistake was imposing your view on someone else. It might not be important to you, or to me. But it goes without saying that in this country a young woman’s virginity is of the utmost importance to her, no matter how modern and European she is.” “You said Sibel didn’t care….” “Even if Sibel didn’t care, society did,” said Zaim. “I’m sure you didn’t care either, but when White Carnation wrote those awful lies about you, everyone was talking. And even though you say you don’t care, now you’re upset about it—am I right?”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 416 | Loc. 8046-59  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:49 PM

“But let me speak to you as a friend,” he said. “Kemal, my friend, those people didn’t turn their backs on you; you turned your back on them.” “Now how did I do that?” “By turning in on yourself, and taking no joy or interest in our world. I know you believe you went your own way, in pursuit of something deep and meaningful. You followed your heart; you made a stand. Don’t be angry with us….” “Might it be something simpler than that? The sex was so good that I became obsessed…. That’s what love is like. Maybe you’re the one finding some deep meaning in all this, something projected from your own world. Actually, our love has nothing to do with you and yours!” Those last words came out of my mouth of their own accord. Suddenly I felt as if Zaim was regarding me from a great distance; he had already given up on me a long time ago, and was only now accepting that he couldn’t be alone with me anymore. As he listened to me he was thinking not of me, but of what he would tell his friends. I could read his absence in his face now. And because Zaim was an intelligent man such signals as I had just given were not lost on him, and I could tell that he was angry at me in return. And so the distance was perceptible from either perspective: Suddenly I, too, was seeing Zaim, and my entire past, from a point very far away. “You’re a man of real feeling,” said Zaim. “That is one of the things I cherish about you.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 419 | Loc. 8099-8107  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:53 PM

I struggled for a long time to convey for the Museum of Innocence this sensation of being caught in a dream. The condition has two aspects: (a) as a spiritual state, and (b) as an illusory view of the world. The spiritual state is somewhat akin to what follows drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, though it is different in certain ways. It is the sense of not really living in the present moment, this now. At Füsun’s house, as we were eating supper, I often felt as if I were living a moment in the past. Only a moment before we would have been watching a Grace Kelly film on television, or another like it; true, our conversations at the table were more or less alike, but it was not such sameness that invoked this mood; rather it was a sense of not abiding in those moments of my life as they were occurring, experiencing these moments as if I were not living them. While my body lived out the present on the screen, my mind was watching Füsun and me from a slight distance, and my soul watched from a greater one.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 420 | Loc. 8135-40  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 07:54 PM

“You’ve made a good start on this, Füsun,” I said. “Lemon is going to be your best painting yet. After all, you know your subject so well, and it’s by drawing on the subjects one knows best that one makes the most successful art.” “But I’m not aiming for realism.” “What do you mean?” “I’m not going to paint his cage. Lemon will be perched in front of the window like a wild bird who has alighted there of his own free will.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 430 | Loc. 8320-28  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 08:07 PM

and soon I would find myself asking her a question. “What is love?” “I don’t know.” “Love is the name given to the bond Kemal feels with Füsun whenever they travel along highways or sidewalks; visit houses, gardens, or rooms; or whenever he watches her sitting in tea gardens and restaurants, and at dinner tables.” “Hmmm … that’s a lovely answer,” Füsun would say. “But isn’t love what you feel when you can’t see me?” “Under those circumstances, it becomes a terrible obsession, an illness.” “What has this got to do with the driving examination?” Füsun would say. Then she would behave as if this sort of dalliance could not be allowed to go on if a couple was unmarried, and I would take care not to make any more such jokes for the rest of the day.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 435 | Loc. 8424-28  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 08:13 PM

It was as if I were looking at a panoramic miniature painting, not just of the Bosphorus and the city, but of the life I’d left behind. It felt like a dream, this sense I had of being far from the city and my own past. To have reached the middle of the city, in the middle of the Bosphorus, to be so distant from everyone else but together with Füsun, felt like the chill of death. When a wave larger than the others hit Füsun unexpectedly and she let out a shriek, and wrapped her arms around my neck and shoulders to hold on, I knew then that only death would part us.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 438 | Loc. 8473-79  | Added on Thursday, December 04, 2014, 11:53 PM

Sometimes the passage of time would be marked by seeing a building torn down, or discovering that a little girl had become a high-spirited, buxom woman with children of her own, or I’d notice that some store to which my eyes had grown accustomed had been boarded up, and I would feel anxious. When I saw, at around this time, that the Şanzelize Boutique had closed, I was pained not only at the loss of my own memories, but equally by a sudden feeling that life had gone on without me. In the window where Sibel had spied the counterfeit Jenny Colon handbag nine years earlier, coils of Italian salamis were now hanging, and wheels of hard yellow cheese, as well as the European brands of bottled salad dressings, the pastas and soft drinks just entering the Turkish market.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 442 | Loc. 8554-57  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:00 AM

I called to mind my own father’s death so that I might better share in her grief. But much as I’d loved my father, there’d always been a tension between us, a rivalry of sorts. Füsun, by contrast, had loved her father deeply, tirelessly, and without effort or reservation, just as one might love one’s home, and one’s street, and the sun that shone down on them. And it seemed to me that her tears were shed not just for her father but also for the state of the world, and the course of life.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 445 | Loc. 8617-24  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:06 AM

As I thought all this over, I realized that Tarık Bey, like his wife, had known from the beginning that I was in love with his daughter. Or rather, I did not so much realize this as confess it to myself. He’d almost certainly known very early on that I’d been so irresponsible as to sleep with his daughter when she was but eighteen years old, and, inevitably, dismissed me as a heartless rich man, a boorish philanderer. As I was the one who had forced him to marry his precious girl off to a penniless boy with no prospects, he could not but have hated me! But he had never once shown his resentment; or perhaps I had never once wanted to see it. I might say he had both resented and forgiven me, as thieves and gangsters keep company by turning a blind eye on one another’s iniquities and disgraces. This was why, after the first few years, he’d ceased to be the man of the house, just as I had ceased to be the guest: We had become partners in crime.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
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“My son, you can’t find happiness with that girl. If you could, you’d have found it by now. I don’t think you should go to the funeral either.” I did not infer from my mother’s words that I had ruined my life: Quite to the contrary, she’d reminded me, and I felt this all the time now, that I was soon to share a happy life with Füsun. And so I was not in the least angry with her; I even smiled as I listened to her lecture, my only wish being to return to Füsun’s side at once. Seeing she’d made no impression on me, my mother was incensed. “In a country where men and women can’t be together socially, where they can’t see each other or even have a conversation, there’s no such thing as love,” she vehemently declared. “By any chance do you know why? I’ll tell you: because the moment men see a woman showing some interest, they don’t even bother themselves with whether she’s good or wicked, beautiful or ugly—they just pounce on her like starving animals. This is simply their conditioning. And then they think they’re in love. Can there be such a thing as love in a place like this? Take care! Don’t deceive yourself.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 450 | Loc. 8717-25  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:13 AM

For a moment it was as if all the traffic clattering past Satsat had fallen silent, along with the wider world. Seeing me transfixed by what she’d said, my cigarette burning down unnoticed in my hand, Aunt Nesibe retold her story from the beginning, this time lavishing more detail. “To tell the truth, I could never feel any anger toward that boy,” she said, in a worldly-wise tone of voice that implied she had known from the start how all this would turn out. “Yes, he has a good heart, but he’s also very weak. What mother would want a bridegroom like that?” she said, and then fell silent. I was expecting her next to say something like, Of course, we had no choice, but she said something utterly different. “I’ve experienced a bit of this in my own life. It’s very difficult, being a beautiful woman in this country especially a divorcée—more difficult, even, than being a beautiful girl…. When men can’t get what they want from a beautiful woman, they do evil things to her—you know this, too, Kemal; and Feridun protected Füsun from all those evils.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 451 | Loc. 8726  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:13 AM

For a moment I wondered whether I was one of the evils Feridun had protected her from.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 455 | Loc. 8806-7  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:16 AM

We fell silent, and for a time picked at our profiteroles. As I watched her mouth, now filled with sweet chocolate and cream, it was not desire I felt, but love.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 456 | Loc. 8825-33  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:18 AM

When, for a moment, a mysterious silence fell over the whole patisserie, I whispered that I loved her very much and would obey her every wish, desiring nothing else in the world than to spend the rest of my life with her. “Really?” she said, in the same childish manner as when doing her math homework. She was confident and determined enough to laugh at her own words. Carefully lighting another cigarette, she enumerated her other demands: I was never to hide anything from her, I would share all my secrets, and whatever question she asked about my past, I was to answer it truthfully. As I listened, everything I saw engraved itself upon my memory: Füsun’s stern, willful expression, the patisserie’s ancient ice cream machine, and the framed photograph of Atatürk, whose frown so closely resembled Füsun’s.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 457 | Loc. 8855-58  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:20 AM

At the beginning of summer, when the cinemas began to show two or three films for the price of one, I remember a day when I’d sat down, adjusting my trousers to be as comfortable as possible, setting my newspapers and magazines on the empty seat beside me, thus deferring my blind search for Füsun’s hand, and before I could act, it landed on my lap like an impatient sparrow, opening expectantly on my belly for a moment, as if to ask, Where are you? And at that moment, moving faster than my soul, my hand wrapped itself longingly around hers.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 459 | Loc. 8884-85  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:21 AM

work. As I looked into Feridun’s eyes, I was obliged to accept another fact I had long hidden from myself: that my presence had curtailed the happiness Füsun might have shared with her husband during the early years of their marriage.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 461 | Loc. 8936-39  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:25 AM

I went upstairs to wash, and Füsun, who could have washed her hands downstairs in the kitchen, followed me up. At the top of the stairs I took her by the arms and kissed her passionately. It was a deep and mature kiss, lasting ten or twelve seconds. Nine years ago we had kissed like children. But there was nothing childish about this kiss, with its slow, powerful soulfulness. Then Füsun went downstairs ahead of me, at a run.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 466 | Loc. 9042-45  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:31 AM

ON AUGUST 27, 1984, at a quarter past twelve, Çetin parked the car in front of the house in Çukurcuma, ready to drive to Europe. It had been exactly nine years and four months since Füsun and I had met at the Şanzelize Boutique, but I did not give this coincidence much thought, nor did I dwell upon the ways in which my life and my character had changed in the intervening years.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 467 | Loc. 9057-59  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:32 AM

Once the car had crossed the limits of Istanbul, all the suffering I’d endured for the love of Füsun was suddenly reduced to a sweet story that could be told in one breath. After all, a love story that ends happily scarcely deserves more than a few sentences!
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 470 | Loc. 9105-9  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:35 AM

I did as I’d done as a child, first concentrating to put out of my mind whatever the cause of my happiness, so that I might then look around me with fresh eyes and see the beauty of everything anew: on the wall a fetchingly elegant photograph of Atatürk in a frock coat, beside it a panorama of the Swiss Alps, a prospect of the Bosphorus Bridge, and—a souvenir of nine years ago—an image of Inge posing sweetly with a bottle of Meltem. I saw a clock showing the time to be twenty past nine, and a sign on the wall behind the reception desk warning that “couples will be asked to present a marriage certificate.”
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 475 | Loc. 9234-37  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:43 AM

but if I particularize, let no one imagine that we lived these moments in full consciousness, or that I remember each and every one. The whiplash of living at once what I had been awaiting for years, the sheer disbelief at finding happiness in this world, had reduced the pleasures to a series of luminous moments, discrete and without measure, like so many fireflies, beaming and vanishing in an instant. But the images entering my head beyond my control, as in a dream, molded into one general impression.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 477 | Loc. 9258  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:44 AM

These dream images taught me that the happiness of being alive could never be separated from the pleasures of seeing this world.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
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the felicitous fit of our various appendages, as if the elements of our respective anatomies were pieces of a single instrument ordinarily disassembled;
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 478 | Loc. 9289-93  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:46 AM

1. The joyful recognition of some of Füsun’s gestures, first identified during the forty-four days we had spent making love nine years earlier, in 1975. Her moans, the innocent tenderness that illuminated her face—the way she frowned when intrigued to find me grasping her powerfully by the waist to reverse our positions; the felicitous fit of our various appendages, as if the elements of our respective anatomies were pieces of a single instrument ordinarily disassembled; the way, when we were kissing, her lips would open up like a flower—these were the details I’d recalled and dreamed of for nine years, longing to relive each one.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 479 | Loc. 9294-9300  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:46 AM

2. The many little particulars that I had forgotten and so had been unable to dream about, now recalled with surprise as I watched Füsun enacting them: the way she’d use two fingers like a pair of tongs to take my wrist, the twitch of the mole right below her shoulder (many other moles were just where I’d left them); the way her eyes would cloud over at the height of pleasure before refocusing on the little things around her (the watch left on the tabletop, or the electric wires running the perimeter of the ceiling); the way she would relax her grip after holding me tight, making me think that she was about to pull away, only to grab me all the more forcefully—that night I remembered all these forgotten little mannerisms that now gave our lovemaking an earthy quality that rescued it from becoming some surreal fantasy fed by nine years of dreaming and imagining.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 479 | Loc. 9300-9306  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:47 AM

3. A number of habits, manifestly new, of which I had no recollection, which surprised and unsettled me to the point of jealousy. The digging of her fingernails into me; her way of becoming lost in thought at the most intense moments of love-making, as if to ponder her bliss or its meaning; the habit of going suddenly limp, as if having fallen off to sleep, or of sinking her teeth into my arm or my shoulder, as if to cause me real pain—these things made me think that she was not the old Füsun. I was content at one point to put it all down to the novelty of this experience: During our forty-four days together nine years ago we had never spent a night together in the same bed. Still, I was troubled no less by the ferocity of her lovemaking than by her tendency to passively withdraw into private thought.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 479 | Loc. 9306-9  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:47 AM

4. The simple fact of her being someone else now. The eighteen-year-old girl I had known and made love to was still living within her, but as the years passed, she had been buried deeper and deeper within, like the sapling encased in the bark of the tree. I loved the Füsun now lying at my side far more than I’d ever loved the young girl I’d met so many years before. Time had favored us both with growth of wisdom, and of depth, it pleased me to see.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 488 | Loc. 9481-85  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:55 AM

After six weeks they got me started on physical therapy. Learning to walk again felt like starting life over, and as I embarked on my new existence, I thought about Füsun constantly. But thinking about her now had no connection to the future, or to the desire I’d once felt; slowly Füsun became a dream of the past, the stuff of memories. This was unbearably painful, now that suffering for her no longer took the form of desiring her, but of pitying myself. I was at this point—hovering between fact and remembrance, between the pain of loss and its meaning—when the idea of a museum first occurred to me.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 490 | Loc. 9519-22  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 12:58 AM

One thing she said I took to heart, however; in the middle of the meal, apropos of nothing, she said she knew “deep in her bones” that I would one day be very happy. I had never more keenly felt that the chance for happiness in this life was forever lost to me. Perhaps this is why, although Mehmet seemed very much the old Mehmet, with Nurcihan I felt as if I were meeting a new person, as if all those memories in common no longer existed.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 493 | Loc. 9575-77  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 01:03 AM

The moment we were airborne, I noticed that outside Istanbul, I was able to think about Füsun and our story more profoundly. In Istanbul I’d always seen Füsun through the prism of my obsession; but in the plane I could see my obsession, and Füsun, from the outside.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 494 | Loc. 9606  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 01:05 AM

My observations and the love I had lived had become intertwined.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 497 | Loc. 9658-61  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 01:09 AM

At Munich’s Alte Pinakothek (whose stairs would serve as a model for those in my own museum) the sight of Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Sacrifice of Abraham reminded me of having told Füsun this story many years earlier, and of the moral of giving up the thing most precious to us while expecting nothing in return.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 498 | Loc. 9684-86  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 01:11 AM

amid the silence of the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, I had an intimation that I would be able to say what it was that gave life meaning, and offered me the greatest solace, but as with the first blush of love, I couldn’t at first express what bound me to such places.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 499 | Loc. 9693-97  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 01:12 AM

When I first set eyes on Caravaggio’s The Sacrifice of Isaac at the Uffizi in Florence, first tears came to my eyes, at the thought of never having had the chance to see this painting with Füsun, and then I saw in the painting that the unremarked lesson of Abraham’s sacrifice was that it is possible to substitute for one’s most cherished object another, and that this was why I felt so attached to the things of Füsun’s that I had collected over the years.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 499 | Loc. 9703-5  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 01:13 AM

Then at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California, I remembered again why some museums had the power to make me shudder: They induced the feeling that I had become suspended in one age while the rest of humanity lived in another.
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The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International) (Orhan Pamuk)
- Highlight on Page 501 | Loc. 9726-32  | Added on Friday, December 05, 2014, 01:16 AM

“So where are we going to put this, Kemal Bey?” asked Çetin Efendi. “I want to spend the rest of my life under the same roof with this car,” I said with a smile, but Çetin Efendi understood at once that I was earnest, and unlike the others, he did not say, “Oh, please, Kemal Bey, life must go on—you can’t die with the dead.” Had he done so, I would have explained that the Museum of Innocence was to be a place where one could live with the dead. Though I had prepared this answer in advance, the words now stuck in my throat: Prompted by pride, I said something altogether different. “There are lots of things stored in the Merhamet Apartments. I want to bring them together under one roof and spend the rest of my days among them.”
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