Elif Shafak

There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel set between the 19th century and modern times, about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris – their lives all curiously touched by the epic of Gilgamesh.

From the bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees

There are Rivers in the Sky

soochie

“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire because they want to have them in their possession. It's all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It's all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt"

Cassandra Tang

Not every written word is meant for the eyes of every reader. Just as not every spoken word needs to be heard by every eavesdropper. 

Words are like birds. When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and labourers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs. 

Never make a major decision unless you’ve spent seven days contemplating it. 

… in deciding what will be remembered, a museum, any museum, is also deciding, in part, what will be forgotten. 

A poem is a swallow in flight. You can watch it soar through the infinite sky, you can even feel the wind passing over its wings, but you can never catch it, let alone keep it in a cage. Poems belong to no one. 

We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honour, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. 

Amelia

"Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I'm afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their sufiering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave."

Water hardens in adverse circumstances, not unlike the human heart. 

What happens after catastrophes? Those who survive nurse their broken hearts and start all over again, as one always does, as one always must.

There are Rivers in the Sky quotes

Join the club