The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That's why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another. -- Snow pg 119

Turkey, with its political intolerance, as I have described it, is prepared to march forward, to break with its taboo about the Armenians, and is making great strides with respect to human rights and freedom of speech so that it can join the European Union. This alone shows how powerful the European idea is.

What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.

My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.

...every person has a star, every star has a friend, and for every person carrying a star there is someone else who reflects it, and everyone carries this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart.

Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with.

Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.