Sublime

C’est sa propre vie que le peuple turc doit exposer dans ses musées, et non pas de mauvaises imitations de l’art occidental. Nos musées doivent exhiber notre vraie vie et non les fantasmes d’occidentalisation des riches. Mon musée est le produit de toute une vie, la mienne et celle de Füsun, et tout ce que je vous raconte est réel, Orhan Bey.

Apart from beautiful ladies like my mother, I cannot say I was very fond of adults in Istanbul, finding them in the main ugly, hairy, and coarse. They were too clumsy, too heavy, and too realistic. It could be they had once known something of a hidden second world, but they seemed to have lost their capacity for amazement and forgotten how to dream

But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.