Elif Batuman quotes - page 2

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly. (Elif Batuman)
I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the version you would come up with would be unsociable, lame, and basically less beautiful than the truth. View quote
Elif Batuman
Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey. View quote
Elif Batuman
There's a lot to be said for an American-style liberal-arts education, which prevents young people from professionalizing right away. View quote
Elif Batuman
It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff. View quote
Elif Batuman
The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: 'Don Quixote' contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric romance and its insufficiency to account for the way real life feels when you get up in the morning in 17th-century Spain. View quote
Elif Batuman
Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life. View quote
Elif Batuman
When you walk around, you have all this stuff rattling around in your head, things that have happened to you, things you have read. Life is just life, and you get what you get out of it. View quote
Elif Batuman
My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue about. But that's - anyway that's how I was brought up, so it would be odd for me to suddenly just up and start wearing a headscarf. View quote
Elif Batuman
From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating. View quote
Elif Batuman
One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person leaves and takes the story with them. And you're left there without it. You're left in this version of life that's basically a succession of events and interactions that don't seem to be going anywhere. (Elif Batuman)
I enjoy a good meal as much as anyone, but I get so confused by nutritional, budgetary, ecological, ethical, aesthetic, and time-management concerns that I often subsist for weeks on instant oatmeal and multivitamins. View quote
Elif Batuman
I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were. View quote
Elif Batuman
Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating. View quote
Elif Batuman
People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time. View quote
Elif Batuman
It's so embarrassing and painful to be young. View quote
Elif Batuman
If you are in a breakup, you might as well go all the way and spend the summer in Samarkand, with no air-conditioning, learning a language you have no use for. At least it adds some romance to a depressing situation. View quote
Elif Batuman
I have always known my mother as an agnostic, less certain than my father that the universe hadn't been created by some great intelligence. But she would get even more annoyed than my father did when she thought that people were invoking God to do their jobs for them - for example, when she saw a bus with a sticker saying 'Allah Protect Us.' View quote
Elif Batuman
I felt grateful to Ataturk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren't held back by superstition or religion, that they were true scientists who taught me how to read when I was three and never doubted that I could become a writer. View quote
Elif Batuman
You base your actions on a projected ending, which you actually don't know. However, when you reach the crucial point, and the pinnacle event doesn't occur, you just need to go on, and something else will happen. View quote
Elif Batuman
There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly. (Elif Batuman)
There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive. View quote
Elif Batuman
Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature. View quote
Elif Batuman
Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually. View quote
Elif Batuman
You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination. View quote
Elif Batuman