The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International)

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it.

If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.

I could not forget her.

But to designate this as my happiest moment is to acknowledge that it is far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful.

During those carefree days when Füsun and I met every day in secret, I never asked myself such questions, behaving only like a child greedily gulping one sweet after another.

“Your problem is not that you’re in love with another woman—it’s that you are not in love with me.”

As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take its first solo walk outside the body.

and on the few nights when we were moved to embrace, it was only in camaraderie and compassion.

It must have been then I first came to realize that for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile, a narrow path of lies, punishment, and repression.