The Dervish House

Quotes

1. Economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics.

   p. 72

2. 

   Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant.

   p. 251

3. 

   It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution.

   p. 223

4. 

   At some point it will inevitably crash again: as weapons of mass destruction go, unrestricted market economies are among the more subtle but sure.

   p. 140

5. 

   Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years.

   p. 158

6. 

   He has no belief—faith is beneath his dignity—but he enjoys the designed madness of religion.

   p. 21

7. 

   The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended.

   p. 207

8. 

   Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.

   p. 109

9. 

   He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound.

   p. 178

That’s all the quotes.

9 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more