Elif Shafak

'In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila's consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away . . . ' Our brains stay active for ten minutes after our heart stops beating. For Tequila Leila, each minute brings with it a new memory- growing up with her father and his two wives in a grand old house in a quiet Turkish town; watching the women gossip and wax their legs while the men went to mosque; sneaking cigarettes and Western magazines on her way home from school; running away to Istanbul to escape an unwelcome marriage; falling in love with a student who seeks shelter from a riot in the brothel where she works. Most importantly, each memory reminds Leila of the five friends she met along the way - the friends who are now desperately trying to find her.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World

Elad Schulman

Mateja

Jels

'My mother - I used to call her Auntie - she often felt the same way, maybe worse. People always told her to fight depression. But I have a feeling that as soon as we see something as our enemy we make it stronger. Like a boomerang. You hurl it away, it comes back and hits you with equal force. Maybe what you need is to befriend your depression.'

'What a funny thing to say, honey. How am I to do that?'

'Well, think about it: a friend is someone you can walk with in the dark and learn lots of things from. But you also know you are different people - you and your friend. You are not your depression. You are much more than what your mood is today or tomorrow.'

Manuela Miksa

What she failed to see earlier she saw now: the doors were padlocked, the windows sealed, and Istanbul was not a city of opportunities, but a city of scars. 

She was a foreigner and, like all foreigners, she carried with her the shadow of an elsewhere.

Jennifer

Little did she yet understand that the end of childhood comes not when a child's body changes with puberty, but when her mind is finally able to see her life through the the eyes of

How could the mind condense an entire life into the time it took to boil a kettle?

'Grief is a swallow,' he said. 'One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.'

Cassandra Tang

Leila had always found it fascinating that the cops and the criminals shed their dead skin cells on the same floor, and the same dust mites gobbled them up, without favour or partiality. At some level invisible to the human eye, opposites blended in the most unexpected ways.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World quotes

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