Elif Safak Quotes

Once the love bug wears off, as it inevitably does, you are shocked to discover that you really didn't know the object of your affections at all. We know this to be so, even as we repeat the same mistake over and over and over.

The biggest mistake people are making when it comes to fashion is looking in the mirror and thinking you're somebody else. People sit and watch the runway and then some nice little plump lady in Squeedunk will see Angelina Jolie in a very glamorous dress from the runway and she thinks if she buys that dress she'll look like her. It's sad, but it's true.

I never said I didn't like kissing you. The problem is too many guys have like kissing you." - Erik Night to Zoey Redbird (Ch 26)

Too often in my life, love has been defined as "humiliation with occasional roses".

Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.

Only in rock music and the literary world you see so many ugly white guys with beautiful women. That says a lot about the women, their character. They're attracted to more than surface.

Every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own.

The only time that love is an easy game is when two other people are playing it.

I think it's a major epidemic in women, faking orgasms. So many women in this world feel like they are put on this planet to please men, that they have to fake, and they never worry about their own pleasure.

All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men.

Nothing can be more delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes.

Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman

Love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies. There's always SOMETHING after happily ever after.

Men are thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are occupied with love.

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

I've always really been interested in the Pygmalion myth and both what it has to say about creativity and what it has to say about relationships between men and women. I'd been thinking about what I would want to do with that if I was going to write on that theme, and one morning I woke up and Calvin and Ruby Sparks were in my head.

I do what most women do. I meet someone and some of it's right, maybe he looks right, or has the right job, or the right background, and, instead of sitting back and waiting for him to reveal his other bits, I make them up. I decide how he thinks, how he's going to treat me, and, sure enough, every time I conclude that this time he's definitely my perfect man, and all of a sudden, well, not so suddenly perhaps, usually around six months after we've split up, I see that he wasn't the person I thought he was at all.

Falling in love is great but being in love is a disaster

You cannot be in love with love.

If you're dating a man who you think might be "Mr. Right," if he a) got older, b) got a new job, or c) visited a psychiatrist, you are in for a nasty surprise. The cocoon-to-butterfly theory only works on cocoons and butterflies.

Love is a matter of give and take -- marriage, a matter of misgive and mistake.

Liberation and equal-rights issues notwithstanding, it was a man's job to make a woman feel cherished and respected.

Fortunately for women, most men mistake loneliness for love before marriage, and habit for happiness afterward.