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Here in front of the greenhouses is my favorite spot. When the sun’s out, you pull up a chair and sit alongside the others. We’re a community of sun worshippers. We recognize one another. We take pleasure in each other’s basking. The true baskers don’t do anything at all. You see? No books, no newspapers, no phones. Only the sun. This year, I didn’t go on holiday, but just look at me. It’s like I spent months on the Mediterranean.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 149)

I could consult him whenever I wanted, like certain books I wished to have in our library, even if I didn’t intend to read them, because they provided comfort in their silent knowledge.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 143)

I turned the camera to film him. Manu didn’t notice me. He must have been listening to the history podcast that transported him, on any given week, to a different place. This was one reason for Manu’s calm optimism, because he was constantly immersed in narratives of creation and collapse, centuries condensed to the span of forty-five minutes, from which he emerged, taking off his headphones, a little transformed, back in the present world, which was no more or less strange than the one he’d just traveled to.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 142)

It makes me feel younger to see you. It was a shock to be reminded of my youth, which I had recently abandoned. It seemed to belong to another time, when the future happened on its own rather than being shaped by our efforts.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 134)

Don’t worry about it, my mother said, each time I apologized for not being there. We have everything sorted out. That made me even sadder, as if my arrival had never been expected and they’d never really counted on me to help.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 127)

This was a game we’d played from the very beginning, back when we used to leave campus to wanter around town. We would spot ourselves in old couples, especially those that were a little clumsy. We considered that a slightly pathetic appearance was in part a sign of their cheer, a lack of vanity with which they’d weathered the years. Looking at the couple with their drooping outfits, I could see another way to live.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 126)

At home, I placed the vase in various settings but everywhere I tried, it looked unnecessary, even ugly, so I put it away in a cupboard with other objects I had bought without dedication, because they had briefly offered an idea of something.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 122)

We still listened to the blind man in the city, though we no longer ate these things that tilted and stretched our minds. Even so, whenever the blind man’s music started, we remembered the forest undergrowth—that other frequency that was a bit slower, a bit stranger, which made colors very bright and tender.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 102)

In Tereza’s presence, the world seemed less urgent. The poems cleared out spaces in us and filled us with their shapes. Sitting around the table, I felt that we should try and live like this, reassembling the world in poetry, where things were a little lopsided. Now there was the green jacket, the ceremonial stones, breakfast with Manu, the Dame on the terrace, and the shapes of poems.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 101)

It occurred to me that we didn’t know anything about Ravi’s family. He, too, had never introduced them to us. Perhaps he felt the same apprehension I did, that his parents would dismiss our friendship. Or maybe he dreaded consolidating his different selves.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 61)

My daughter’s friends are my daughters, she said, and I was flooded with emotion. It was a life we’d given up long ago, Manu and I, by choice or by circumstance, I wasn’t quite sure. A life where we would have been sons and daughters to many people, could show up to eat unannounced.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 55)

In some ways, Ravi was also an expert at self-portraiture, or rather representing himself through objects.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 47)

It looked as if the Dame had broken away from everything that constricted her—that stood in the way of her work, her love for life. And yet it seemed that in breaking free altogether, she had no one left besides the group of strangers who got on her nerves.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 46 - 47)

I had an idea that Lena had a real life outside of our friendship, one in which she was a native in ways I could never understand. What did Lena and her native friends joke about? Where did they go on a Friday night? What did they consider cool or weird? This last one was always on my mind. Just like the fear of my family thinking me a stranger, I feared that strangers would find me weird.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 40 - 41)

Over the years, Manu and I had taught each other words and phrases from our own languages: those without any equivalent, that defined not just something essential about our mother tongues, but about us as well. These words became part of our shared language, growing in meaning once they were plucked out of their habitats. The native lexicon illuminated aspects of the other person—an orientation toward the world... Sharing our language was a bit like sharing family histories, which we still did, after so many years together.

— Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (Page 37 - 38)