Unutma Dersleri - Nermin Yıldırım

"Yani belki de aşk, birine karşı duyulan hisler toplamından ziyade, kendi başına yetişen, sahibini arayan öksüz duyguların neticesidir."

"Aşk, kazanmayı planladığınız değil, kaybetmeyi göze aldığınız şeylerin toplamıdır."

"Mutsuzluğun paraya en kolay tahvil edilen şey olduğunu bilir, başkalarının kasaveti üzerinden cep doldurmaya soyunan iştirakçilerden hazzetmezdim."

"Aklını kaçırmış birini arıyorsanız başka yere bakmayın; muhakkak buradadır. Banka müşterinin, müşteri de bankanın hayatını karartmak için vardır."

"... uçan balonlar misali ana babalarının elinden kurtulup sağa sola koşturan neşe palamudu çocuklar..."

"... dünya, kırmızı saten pijamaya hallenen boğa şehvetiyle üstüme üstüme yürüyordu."

"Sevgilim, tek başıma seni özlemek çok zor. Hiç değilse sen de beni özleyerek el veremez misin?"

"Beklemek çünkü, bir olmanızı oldurmayı umanların safdilliğidir. Gelecekler zaten kalbini yormadan gelir. Bekletmek, gelmeyeceklerin işidir. Bu yüzden en çok gelmeyecek olanlar beklenir."

"Öbür yarısını özleyen yırtık fotoğraflar gibiyim."

"Kalp her dilde aynı kırılyorsa benim suçum ne?"

"Bazı acıların çünkü, cümlesi olmaz. Sözcükler, kimi manaların yükünü kaldıramaz."

"İnsan tek ömürde, aynı bedende, birden fazla kişi olarak yaşıyor. Her kayıp, her acı tecrübe, her günbatımı ve gözyaşıyla biraz değişiyor. Her kazanım, tatlı deneyim, gündoğumu ve tebessümle değiştiği gibi... İnsan, tek kişi olarak doğup çok kişi olarak ölüyor. Kimileri buna çoklu kişilik bozukluğu diyor, ben insanlık hali demeyi tercih ederim."

"Bir şeyler arayıp durmayı, bulmanın aramakla değil, kaybetmekle ilgili olduğunu anladığımda bıraktım."

"Yürüdüğüm yolun varacağı istikbalden, Kifidis terlik ve varis çorabından fazlasını umamayacağımı görünce...."

"Romanlar vurucu bir yerde, planlı bir şekilde biter. Hayatsa nerede nihayeti ereceği muamma, döke saça devam eder."

Kara Kitap - Orhan Pamuk

"O yıllarda mikroplar ünlüydü, ilaçlar değil: Boğaz'ın temiz havasının çocukların kabakulağına iyi geleceğine inanılırdı."

"Tophane rıhtımından Çanakkale'ye asker gönderen Gülcemal vapurunu torpillemek isterken, uskuru balıkçı ağlarına, burnu da yosunlu kayalara çarptıktan sonra deniz dibine çöken İngiliz denizaltısının soba borusu gibi kullanılan periskobundan çıkan mavimsi dumanları görünce, oksijensizlikten ağzı açık kalmış İngiliz iskeletlerinin temizlendiği ve kadifeyle kaplı albay koltuğunda Çin porselenleriyle akşam çayını Liverpool tezgahlarında imal edilmiş yeni yuvalarına huzurla alışan vatandaşlarımızın içtiğini anlayacağım."

"Kendimden, her zamanki gibi, memnun değildim, ama yazımdan ve hikayemden memnundum. Bu küçük yazı zaferimi uzun bir yürüyüşle hayal edersem, belki hiç geçmeyen bir hastalık gibi üzerime sinen mutsuzluk duygusundan biraz olsun kurtulurum sanıyordum."

"Uzun bir günün, hatta akşamın ardından insanın yalnız başına kalıp, kendi koltuğuna oturup kendisi olabilmesi, yıllar süren uzun ve maceralı bir yolculuktan sonra yolcunun kendi evine dönmesine benziyor."

"... hayatımın ilk yarısını bir başkası olmak istediğim için kendim olamadan, ikinci yarısını da kendim olamadığım yıllar için pişman olduğum için bir başkası olarak geçirecektim."

"Apartman aralığı, dikkat edilmezse boşluğun yuttuğu bu zavallı eşyaların talihsizliğiyle kazayla içine kendilerinin de düşebileceği bir çirkefti; içlerine sinsice sokulmuş bir kötülük yuvasıydı."

"Yaratıcılık, çoğunlukla öfkenin, her şeyi unutturan o öfkenin içindedir, ama öfke bizi ancak daha önce başkalarından öğrendiğimiz yöntemler aracılığıyla harekete geçirebilir."

"Zaten okumak yazarın harflerle anlattığı şeyleri aklın sessiz sinemasında bir bir resimlendirmekten başka nedir ki?"

"... ve hatta açacağın yanında dalgın bir yengeç gibi dinlenen kendi eli..."

"Dünya bir ipuçları deniziydi; her damlasında arkasındaki esrara varacak bir tuz tadı vardı."

"... hiçbiri birbirini dik kesmeyen ve nasıl keseceği de belli olmayan İstanbul sokaklarındaki her bir gezintinin sonsuzluğa yapılmış bir bayram yolculuğu gibi eğlenceli ve başdöndürücü olduğu..."

"... bir başkasının belleğini ağır ağır edinmekten başka neydi ki okumak?"

"Bana matbaadan çıkmış gazete kokusunun tarifini sordu. Bin dokuz yüz elli sekiz kışındaki yazına göre cevap: Kinin, mahzen, kükürt ve şarap kokusunun karışımı: Yani başdöndürücü bir şey."

"Şehirler adreslerden, adresler harflerden, harfler yüzlerden oluşur."

"Okumak aynanın içine bakmaktır; aynanın arkasındaki 'sırrı' bilenler öteki tarafa geçeler, harflerin sırrından haberdar olmayanlar ise bu dünya içinde kendi yüzlerinin yavanlığından başka bir şey bulamazlar."

"... uykunun en güzel yanının insanın olduğu kişiyle bir gün yerine geçeceğine inanmak istediği kişi arasındaki gözyaşartıcı uzaklığın unutulması kadar, duyduklarıyla hiç duymadıklarını, gördükleriyle hiç görmediklerini ve bildikleriyle hiç bilmediklerini huzurla birbirine karıştırabilmesi olduğunu bir kere daha kavradı."

"... en sıkıcı din dersinden de daha sıkıcı dükkan..."

"... birlikte gittiğimiz bir filmi bir üçüncü kişiye hikaye ederken belleğinin ve hatırladıklarının benimkinden ne kadar farklı olduğunu korkuyla anladığımda seni severdim..."

"Kendi gövdeni rüyanda görür gibi, seni tamamlayan birine özlemle bakmak nedir, bilir misin?"

"Ancak, insan anlattığı şeylerin tükendiğine, bütün hatıraların, hikayelerin ve hafızanın sustuğuna ilişkin o derin sessizliği içinde duyduktan sonradır ki, kendi ruhunun derinliklerinden, kendi benliğinin sonsuz ve karanlık labirentlerinden kendisini kendisi yapacak kendi gerçek sesinin yükselişine tanık olabilir."

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

"Like a person in a storm desperately grasping at a lamppost, he clung to his daily routine."

"Alienation and loneliness became a cable that stretched hundreds of miles long, pulled to the breaking point by a gigantic winch. And through that taut line, day and night, he received indecipherable messages. Like a gale blowing between trees, those messages varied in strength as they reached him in fragments, stinging his ears."

".... talent only functions when it's supported by a tough, unyielding physical and mental focus. All it takes is one screw in your brain to come loose and fall off, or some connection in your body to break down, and your concentration vanishes, like the dew at dawn."

"If talent's the foundation you rely on, and yet it's so unreliable that you have no idea what's going to happen to it the next minute, what meaning does it have?"

"The chair was a simple Scandinavian design of chrome with white leather. Beautiful, clean and silent, with not an ounce of warmth, like a fine rain falling under the midnight sun."

"Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language."

"One heart is not connect to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence with a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony."

"It's no different from building stations. If something is important enough, a little mistake isn't going to ruin it all, or make it make it vanish. It might not be perfect, but the first step is actually building the station. Right? Otherwise trains won't stop there. And you can't meet the person who means so much to you."

'Jim Thompson' The Unsolved Mystery - William Warren

"He had built a major industry in a remote and little-known country whose language he never learned to speak; he had become an authority on art that, previously, he scarcely knew existed and had assembled a collection that attracted scholars from all over the world; he had built a home that was a work of art in itself and one of the landmarks of Bangkok; and, in the process of doing all this, he had become a sort of landmark himself, a personality so widely known in his adopted homeland that a letter addressed simply 'Jim Thompson Bangkok' found its way to him in a city of three and a half million people."

Sightseeing - Rattawut Lapcharoensap

"Pussy and elephants. That's all these people want."

"They say that a century from now this all be gone, that the oceans will rise above this threadbare patch of earth, creating a strait as narrow as Molucca, as fine as Gibraltar, yoking the oceans, severing this nation in two. I can't quite believe this because I never believe anything I won't be around to see."

"I watch the blue of the Andaman on the right side of the train. Ma is turned the other way, watching the murky brown of the Gulf."

"I open my eyes this time as I rush to the bottom, kicking hard against the surface. I see soft shafts of sunlight slicing through a thick, bleary haze. Clusters of blue, clusters yellow, clusters of green disperse all around me, moving as if suspended midair, little pellets of color swimming through a depthless tapestry of light. I hear my feet kicking, my heart beating, the warm water rushing around me. An indistinct seafloor rises up to meet me. I crash into the sand. Perhaps, I think, this is what Ma must feel in the grips of her oncoming blindness. These distinct visions. These fragmented hues. This weightlessness."

The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan

"HAPPY MAN has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else."

"Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not."

"A line was something that proceeded from one point to another—from reality to unreality, from life to hell—‘breadthless length’, as he recalled Euclid describing it in schoolboy geometry. A length without breadth, a life without meaning, the procession from life to death. A journey to hell."

"They were men like other young men, unknown to themselves. So much that lay within them they were now travelling to meet."

"As if rather than him leading them by example they were leading him through adulation."

"To the contrary, Dorrigo Evans understood himself as a weak man who was entitled to nothing, a weak man whom the thousand were forming into the shape of their expectations of him as a strong man. It defied sense. They were captives of the Japanese and he was the prisoner of their hope."

"And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end."

"It was as dizzying as it was bewildering. She seemed a series of slight flaws best expressed in a beauty spot above her right lip. And he understood that the sum of all these blemishes was somehow beauty, and there was about this beauty a power, and that power was at once conscious and unconscious."

"Between them a shaft of light was falling through the window, dust rising within it, and he saw her as if out of a cell window."

"Her imperfections multiplied every time he looked at her and thrilled him ever more; he felt as an explorer in a new land, where all things were upside down and the more marvellous for it."

"For Amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds."

"They are survivors of grim, pinched decades who have been left with this irreducible minimum: a belief in each other, a belief that they cleave to only more strongly when death comes. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever."

"The slimy red flame of a kerosene lantern seemed to Dorrigo Evans to make the blackness leap and twist in a strange, vaporous dance, as if the cholera bacillus was a creature within whose bowels they lived and moved."

"For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence."

"And what was a prisoner of war? Did not the Field Service Code specifically state that a captured officer was to kill himself? What was a prisoner of war? Nothing, that’s what. A man without shame, a man with no honour. A no man."

"It’s like life, isn’t it? You think you’ll outrun it, that you’re better than it, but it makes a fool of you every time. It runs you into the ground and steams off whistling away, happy as buggery with itself."

".... the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage—the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family."

But Beautiful - Geoff Dyer

Lester Young

"He'd [Lester Young] invented his own language in which words were just a tune, speech a kind of singing - a syrup language that sweetened the world but which was powerless to keep it at bay. The harder the world appeared, the softer his language became, until his words were likely beautifully cadenced nonsense, a gorgeous song that Lady had to ears to hear."

Thelonious Monk

"His [Thelonious Monk's] body was his instrument and the piano was just the means of getting the sound out of his body at the rate and in the quantities he wanted."

"Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he'd never seen one before. Came at it from all angles, using his angles, taking chops at it, rippling through the keys like they were a deck of cards, fingers jabbing at them like they were hot to the touch or tottering around them like a woman in heels - playing it all wrong as far as classical piano went."

"His hands were like two racquetball players trying to wrong-foot each other; he was always wrong-fingering himself. But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated."

"If Monk had built a bridge he'd have taken away the bits that are considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts - but somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn't there.

Duke Ellington

"The railroad ran through his [Duke Ellington's] work as it ran through the history of black Americans: they built the railroads, worked on them, travelled on them and eventually there he was, composing on them: that was the tradition he was heir to."

Ben Webster

"He [Ben Webster] carried around his loneliness with him like an instrument case. It never left his side."

"Maybe all exiles are drawn to the sea, the ocean. There is an inherent music in the working sounds of docks and harbours."

"Something about the ink-blue sky, the light showing through the trees, and the long slow yawn of the Thames passing beneath it all - even as you looked it felt like a memory, like something from the past you were telling folks about."

Charles Mingus

"Mingus Mingus Mingus - not a name but a verb, even thought was a form of action, of internalised momentum."

"When he [Charles Mingus] bowed it he made the bass sound like the humming of a thousand-strong congregation in church."

".... his [Charles Mingus'] creativity and his rage were inseparable from each other. To make his music he had to pitch a volatility where there was no difference between provocation and reaction."

"However else jazz changed, that cry had to be there. Strip the modal thing and there was the swing, behind swing the blues, behind the blues that shout, the field holler of slaves."

"Listening to him [Charles Mingus] was like reading a book printed on butter, periods sliding to the middle of a sentence, slithering into each other."

"His [Charles Mingus'] solos got heavier, they swung with the movement of a gravedigger's shovel, weighed down by damp earth."

Chet Baker

"... the way he [Chet Baker] held notes made you think of that moment just before a woman cries, where her face becomes brimful of beauty as water in a glass and you would do anything in the world not to have hurt her the way you have. Her face like something so calm, so perfect, you know it can't last but that moment, more than any other, has something of the quality of eternity about it: when her eyes hold the history of everything men and women have ever said to each other."

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22."

"That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in his favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents."

" 'And don't tell me God is works in mysterious ways' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatalogical mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?' "