Let us rewrite our fates. I assure you. I will hold your hand and take you to the Black Sea, to my native land. On the plateau we will enjoy the best quality of tea, brewed from sprouts of tea, with our offspring.

And why should every Turkish learner know an adjective from a noun?

Staring at one point actually means being something like blind. The eyes take the picture but the data is not processed in the brain. Anyway, that is exactly what happens to me when I look at you.

Maybe it has to do with the semantic difference between infinitives an participles. Generally

                      MAKTAN ÖNCE (envisaged action)

                      DIKTEN SONRA (real action).

I guess the exact translation depends on the context but I have come up with something like this:

Even though I am still smitten with your laughter

but I wish you just became obstinate and buttoned your lips.

There are two idioms in the last part, damarı tutmak and ağzına kilit vurmak.

Interesting views, sufler.

Not that I know but it looks like Turks have the tendency of looking for the subject at the beginning of the sentence. And only if there is no constituent suitable for this purpose other interpretations (like dropped 3rd person pronoun) pop up.

sufler, you are advanced enough to start using T-T dictionaries. arı duru in Güncel Türkçe Sözlük:

http://www.tdk.gov.tr/index.php?option=com_gts&arama=gts&guid=TDK.GTS.52ad9b9f40dc47.11004806

It seems that both arı (<*arığ) and duru (<*turuğ) mean something like ´clean and spotless´.

Column metres have been written about My Name Is Red for sure but I thought it wouldn’t harm if I added a couple of lines from my own personal experience.

My Name Is Red is basically a whodunit. The reader knows from the very beginning that the murderer is one of three people. Each one of them had the chance  -  we are not checking alibis here  -  but the question is who had the ideology and the guts. It is basically about artistic views and religion, a fight between traditional Persian miniature art and Western style which is faithful to what human eyes can see. Islamic prohibition of pictures reluctantly admitted the miniature art which looked at the world from the level of minarets but strictly banned portrets and the artist’s individualistic style.

My Name Is Red is a historical novel. The events take place in the 17^th century Istanbul and the writer certainly has investigated the backgrouds in an admirable way and succeeds in blowing life to Istanbul streets and suburbs of those days. But in my opinion what makes Pamuk´s work a great novel is not only that. My Name Is Red grows out of its time limits and describes human nature and life of societies as they are in every period of history. For instance, religious extremists are not a modern phenomenon, they always existed.

My Name Is Red is a psychological and a feministic novel. For me, its most interesting character is Şeküre, the beautiful daughter of a miniaturist master, the wife of a husband lost in endless Ottoman wars in the East and the mother of two boys. Şeküre never has the chance to follow her true feelings, she has to calculate very carefully which one of her admirers to encourage. She actually only loves her sons. This love and protection is described beatifully, even the physical side of it: Şeküre always sleeps with her children, enjoys their smels, sounds and wet kisses.  -  How very surprising it is that mothers in those dark and violent times loved their children just like we do!

But above all, My Name Is Red is a novel about art. The person who has read it will look at Ottoman miniature art with different eyes  -  even if he never before was really interested in it.

There is a special characteristic for Turkish nouns, transnumeral category or numerus indefinitus. kitap okumak may mean one book or many, and if you use plural marking here it has an individualizing function.

It is a good lesson for those who against all odds believe in the compatibility of grammatical categories in different languages.

Tonight is one of those nights. I am writing some things, making myself bleed. Tonight let us hope for the best. The blood loss is massive.

You are like the gap of a torn out tooth. You won´t appear any more. If you did you would only give me pain. But my tongue will always feel the gap.