Ezgi Harmancı > Ezgi's Quotes

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.”
― Jackson Pearce, Fathomless

“Hardly anyone still reads nowadays. People make use of the writer only in order to work off their own excess energy on him in a perverse manner, in the form of agreement or disagreement.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“İnsan sabahtan akşama kadar bir şey olmasını bekler ve hiçbir şey olmaz. Bekleyip durur insan. Hiçbir şey olmaz. İnsan bekler, bekler, bekler, şakakları zonklayana dek düşünür, düşünür, düşünür. Hiçbir şey olmaz. İnsan yalnız kalır. Yalnız. Yalnız.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“...love must be regarded as one of the religious and dangerous experiences, because it lifts people out of the arms of reason and sets them afloat with no ground under their feet.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“What is it you do, then? I'll tell you: You leave out whatever doesn't suit you. As the author himself has done before you. Just as you leave things out of your dreams and fantasies. By leaving things out, we bring beauty and excitement into the world. We evidently handle our reality by effecting some sort of compromise with it, an in-between state where the emotions prevent each other from reaching their fullest intensity, graying the colors somewhat. Children who haven't yet reached that point of control are both happier and unhappier than adults who have. And yes, stupid people also leave things out, which is why ignorance is bliss. So I propose, to begin with, that we try to love each other as if we were characters in a novel who have met in the pages of a book. Let's in any case leave off all the fatty tissue that plumps up reality.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“Even in his greatest dedication to science he had never managed to forget that people's goodness and beauty come from what they believe, not from what they know.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume II

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there”
― George Harrison

“Kitap bir limandı benim için. Kitaplarda yaşadım. Ve kitaplardaki insanları sokaktakilerden daha çok sevdim.”
― Cemil Meriç

“If you're reading this...
Congratulations, you're alive.
If that's not something to smile about,
then I don't know what is.”
― Chad Sugg, Monsters Under Your Head

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world
but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do
I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too.
well, I hope that if you are out there you read this and know that yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.”
― Rebecca Katherine Martin

“Önce kelime vardı” diye başlıyor Yohanna’ya göre İncil.Kelimelerden önce de Yalnızlık vardı ve kelimeden sonra da var olmaya devam etti yalnızlık.. Kelimenin bittiği yerden başladı. Kelimeler yalnızlığı unutturdu ve yalnızlık kelimeyle birlikte yaşadı insanın içinde.Kelimeler,yalnızlılığı anlattı ve yalnızlığın içinde eriyip kayboldu.Yalnız kelimeler acıyı dindirdi ve kelimeler insanın aklına geldikçe yalnızlık büyüdü,dayanılmaz oldu.”
― Oğuz Atay, Tutunamayanlar

“Ağzının, güzel dudaklarının yanında bir gülümseme yaratmak için, ne uzun yollardan geçiyorsun. Kendinden veriyorsun ve durmadan eksiliyorsun. Oysa bazı insanlar, oldukları gibi kalarak, elde ederler istediklerini. Ben, kanımı damla damla süzerek veriyorum.”
― Oğuz Atay, Tehlikeli Oyunlar

“Aptal, o kadarını biz de anladık.”
― Oğuz Atay, Tehlikeli Oyunlar