Orhan Pamuk Quotes

...Sometimes I suspect that what had really happened was that we became more resigned, more cynical, raised our pain thresholds as we lowered our expectations. All in all, settled for less.

I think I probably hoped for it a little bit, but I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist... or maybe even a pessimist.

I don't have any expectations.

Hope is a tease designed to prevent us from accepting reality.

Cynicism, I contend, is the wailing of someone who believes that things are, or should be, or could be, much, much better than they are.

I just never count on anything. You can't.

Get used to disappointment.

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world.

Once I wanted total happiness - now I will settle for a little less pain.

I would say that I am a jaded man beyond most expectations, but, like everyone else, I still have hope.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

I do not write often now - not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?

If I had known what it would be like to have it all - I might have been willing to settle for less.

Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

Larry David's armor is his dissatisfaction with the world down to the smallest detail, and up to the whole ghastly arrangement. He won't win, but he'll enjoy losing.

I don't have high expectations anymore. Maybe they've just been beaten out of me.

I think by now I have made it fairly clear that I am not very happy with the word hope. I don't believe in people just hoping.

Expectations are an evil thing.

Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.

You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.

A pessimist? That's a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

If one cannot catch a bird of paradise, better take a wet hen.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

Cynicism is the easiest of all reactions, right? But it's also so disappointing and self-defeating.