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Quote by Mehmet Murat Ildan

“In life, the categories we belong to can change very easily and can change so very easily that we in fact belong to every single category! We are hunter, we are victim; we are master, we are slave; we are rich, we are poor; we are lock, we are key! We belong to every category!”

Quote by Mehmet Murat Ildan

Author

Mehmet Murat Ildan
Mehmet Murat Ildan

Mehmet Murat Ildan is a renowned Turkish writer born on May 16, 1965. His works span various literary forms including novels, essays, and poetry, and have gained widespread popularity among readers. more

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“The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.”

“Classification may very well not be useless, but it is never analysis, no matter how baroquely detailed and comprehensive-seeming its categories. At best, it begs questions. At worst it is presumptuous and totalitarian, replacing understanding with filing. We have all heard papers where categories are the driving force, according to which the way we understand literature (or whatever) is to work out what title fits where, as if literary theory was a giant card-catalog. Even when the last book has been slotted neatly into the last of the holes that were cut to be filled with books, what we have are books in neat piles. Which is not nothing, but neither is it that much.”

“Nutmeg." Claudia grabbed the bottle and screwed the cap back on. The story was still filtering through me when a new scent exploded forth. "Orris root," Claudia said, tapping the new bottle on the table. "Am I going too fast for you?" "No," I lied. "Good." Linden blossom. Tonka bean. Benzoin. The smells came at me, little glass missiles fired across the table in rapid succession. "The point is speed and precision," Claudia said. She pushed a stack of papers toward me, the pages divided into rows and columns. "Put each scent in a category. Fresh, floral, woody, spicy, animal, marine, fruity. You need to recognize them instantly, without thinking." The bottles started again, and the world turned into charts and rows, filled with an onslaught of strange names. Litsea cubeba. Frangipani. Neroli. Tagette. Orange broke into pieces, became pettigrain, bergamot, tangerine, mandarin, bitter, sweet, and blood. Pepper was black, green, or pink. Mint was winter, spear, or pepper.”

“By the end of the day, I'd reached the point where I could sense the category of a scent almost before the bottle was open. Fresh was quick and cool, never warm. Floral was soft and seductive, the kind that kept its clothes on, showing only an ankle or a shoulder. Spicy bit your nose, woke you up. Woody sent me to the island so fast I couldn't stop the tears from filling my eyes. I couldn't wait to start combining them, creating something new. Victoria was right- this was a language, my language, and I wanted to write.”

“When we see beings as belonging to a particular group, for instance, we start to believe there's something fundamental and biological that unites all the creatures in that group, that there's some invisible essence that makes a dog a dog and a cat a cat. We do the same thing with humans: if we are told that a category is important, we infer that the people in the people in that category share a fundamental essence. We essentially them. And the more a category is emphasized, the more we think its members have a unifying thread.”