Snow

Love

Chapter 14

Ipek talking to Ka: In other words, you are in love with me because you don't know me at all. Is it really love, that, for you?

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Ka talking to Ipek: Instead of giving a negative answer, don't say a thing.

Chapter 25

Kadife talking to Ka: She finds you very handsome, but she cannot believe you. She also needs time to believe. Because the impatients of your kind don't think about loving a woman but rather about how to own her.

Chapter 28

About Ka: He remembered that he feared to be in love because of that devastating pain caused by the wait.

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By showing himself more ardent and more touchy, when their relationship was but starting, Ka felt that the power balance had turned against him. Fearing to appear too weak and in order to hide the suffering he had endured, he put Ipek in an ackward situation. But, didn't he want precisely to be in love to be able to share everything? Wasn't it love the desire to be able to say everything?

Chapter 33

Ka realized that what we called "family", in spite of misfortune and problems, was an institution founded on the pleasure of the stubborness of being together.

Politics

Chapter 27

Turgut Bey talking to Ka: The question is as follows: me being today a comunist, modernist, secularist, democrat and patriot man, do I have to believe first in the Enlightment or in the people's sovereignty? If I believe till the end in the Enlightment and westernization, I have to support this military coup against the religious. But if I put the people's sovereignty before anything else and if I am a democrat without concession, then, in that case, I have to go and sign that declaration. What do you reckon?

Ka: Be on the side of the oppressed and come sign this declaration.

Turgut Bey : It is not enough to be oppressed, you need to be right too.

Chapitre 31

Young excited Kurd: Suppose a Westerner meets someone belonging to a poor people ; well, first he would feel towards this person an instinctive contempt. He would think right away that if this person is so poor is because he belongs to an idiotic people. And he would very probably think that the head of this person is full of nonsense and idiocy which makes his people drawn into poverty and misery.

Chapter 35

Lazuli: For a person to be Westerner, she has first to be an individual. But, according to them, there is not a single individual in Turkey. There lays the meaning of my execution. Me, as an individual, I oppose Westerners, and it's because I'm an individual that I won't imitate them.

Excerpts from Snow, a book written by Orhan Pamuk