"Linear time is an illusion." Elif Shafak on why our sense of time and reality is wrong: "There is magic in life, in daily life, in even the most ordinary, seemingly ordinary moments. That's one of the reasons why I don't like this term magical realism, because it assumes that there is the world of magic and then there is the world of reality. Whereas I think in life everything is constantly mixed." "We want to think of time as a much more linear, steady march. But when you pay attention to a river, a tree, a rock, just the soil itself, there is no linear time there."