Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Walk
Things
Head
Related Quotes:
" Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining. "
Elif Batuman
Enough
Character
Patient
" The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn't affect me very much because my parents didn't really talk about it. "
Elif Batuman
Problems
Parents
Thinking
" There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky. "
Elif Batuman
Turkey
Literature
Too
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Religion
True
Parents
" The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul. "
Elif Batuman
Time
Hands
Forest
" I do think of 'The Idiot,' in a way, as a self-standing book about a certain struggle to make meaning, the struggle for a girl to find meaning outside of the romance plot. "
Elif Batuman
Think
Book
Struggle
" When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him. "
Elif Batuman
You
Anger
Looking
" 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
Feeling
Life Is A
Story
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Enjoy
Aesthetic
Confused
" I've developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There's a women's detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written by Aleksandra Marinina, the former chief of police. "
Elif Batuman
Former
Women
Love
" Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources. "
Elif Batuman
Resources
Based
Lists
" To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny. "
Elif Batuman
Eating
Kind
Think
" It's so embarrassing and painful to be young. "
Elif Batuman
Young
Embarrassing
Painful
" Awkwardness comes from the realization that, when you look around the world, it's difficult to identify anyone who isn't either the victim or the beneficiary of injustice. "
Elif Batuman
Look
Injustice
Victim
" Awkwardness is the consciousness of a false position. "
Elif Batuman
Position
Consciousness
False
" I grew up hearing that if it hadn't been for Ataturk, my grandmother would have been 'a covered person' who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher. "
Elif Batuman
Grandmother
Teacher
School
" Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time. "
Elif Batuman
Magical
Spooky
Time
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Criticism
Life
Negative
" Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't turn off. We're also thinking about pizza or passing a slow tractor or making a turn, and for a magical instant, our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars. "
Elif Batuman
End
Think
Thinking
" My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey's top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers and professors. "
Elif Batuman
Medical
America
Born
" The Himalayan glaciers, China's trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey - the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about. "
Elif Batuman
Me
World
Trade
" Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. "
Elif Batuman
Writing
Everyone
Get
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Always
Before
Even
" At the beginning of 'A Christmas Carol,' Scrooge embodies one of the central tenets of depression: that one has always been this way - and always will be. "
Elif Batuman
Christmas
Always
Beginning
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Literature
Dreams
Learn
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Love
Sad
Relationship
" I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally. "
Elif Batuman
Summer
Relationships
Problems
" Even when I was very small, my mother treated me like a great novelist. She was like: 'Oh, I'm sitting at the breakfast table with Flaubert,' and would say, if she burned some food or was late arriving, 'Don't put this in your novel!' "
Elif Batuman
Great
Small
Mother
" For a Nabokov fan, paging through 'Fine Lines,' which includes a critical introduction and several essayistic evaluations of Nabokov's scientific oeuvre, can feel a bit like reading the second half of 'Pale Fire': one is confronted by a content-rich, almost dementedly tangential commentary on an increasingly inscrutable work. "
Elif Batuman
Introduction
Work
Feel
" The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad. "
Elif Batuman
Funny
Book
High School