I just finished a book — Beni İçinden Sev (“Love Me From the Inside”). My favourite line: “It’s a beautiful story because you’re in it.” Author: Ahmet Batman. This is the first of his books I’ve read and, honestly, I enjoyed it. With most books I read I find at least one or two things I disagree with — but this one had so much to learn from that I genuinely liked it.
I’m a bit annoyed at myself: while reading I was too lazy to grab a pen, and I didn’t underline the bits I liked. I kept thinking “oh that one was good, that one was good” — and now I have to leaf through every page again. Let me share the few quotes I do remember; maybe you’ll want to pick it up too.
We’re kids of the same era, and my heart happened to land on yours.
If you must strive for something in this life, strive to be someone whose mere presence gives others a sense of safety.
Carve a different path — one no one’s walked, one no one has dreamed.
Those are the ones that stuck. There were a couple more I can’t dig out right now. If you pick the book up, another line I remember vaguely is one his mother says to her son Güçlü. I can’t quote it word-for-word, but the spirit was: “Don’t answer with cruelty when cruelty is done to you.”
The book follows a section of a young person’s life from primary school through university. There’s a bit of drama to it, but the protagonist is a real “hero” type — simple but lovely.
Why the Title: “Land One Arrow on the Target!”
You might wonder what “9 arrows” means and why only one — or sometimes none — would actually hit. The title came to me from one of the author’s closing lines: “With the wish for what’s best for you — not the best, but the most beneficial.”
Sometimes we want everything to be the best, the most beautiful, every wish fulfilled. But it doesn’t always go that way. You fire nine arrows at your target and sometimes only one, or even none, finds it. The right move is to go pick those arrows back up and try again. Dropping a dream halfway because it didn’t come true once is, in my book, the wrong move.
If you try hard enough, there’s nothing you can’t pull off. But also remember: you have to know when to stop too. There’s more than one way to reach a dream — don’t get stuck on one road.
That’s it for now. Stay positive. As I always say: life is short — work for this world as if you’ll never die, and work for the next as if you’ll die tomorrow.
