“Even then I sensed this . . . would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.”

PamukcropThis novel is a collection of beautiful sentences about self-discovery.  For example: “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.” (52)  When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, Orhan Pamuk said in his acceptance speech, “A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is…” Pamuk, like Proust, focuses on realizations instead of plot.

Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 2010), 45.



2 thoughts on ““Even then I sensed this . . . would be at the core of my imagination for the rest of my life.””

  1. Very interesting – especially the line about discovering the second being inside. Maya Angelou had something similar to say about writers: “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” One of the many reasons I love writers is because they are willing to share the inside world with the rest of us. Thanks for a great blog posting.

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