Elif Batuman Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
-
When you make a living from something, it changes your relationship with it.
-
A person's life is of their own making, and I take full responsibility for mine.
-
Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.
-
Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.
-
There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.
-
Focus on being balanced - success is balance.
-
I have spent my life paying attention to my art form, developing my art form, worrying about my show and what I'm bringing to people, making sure that I give them a fine trade.
-
As an assistant operations officer for a helicopter task force in Iraq, I saw my fellow Guardsmen and soldiers risk life and limb to maintain diesel fuel supply lines.
-
I think magazines and interviews make celebrities into this bigger-than-life thing, but I've gotten bullied over trying different things with my makeup.
-
In my music and my life, I'm honest with my feelings, and people appreciate that. That's just the way I am.
-
For my wrap present, Colin Farrell gave me a first edition book. I got so involved with this character and I was so sad when the movie was over that when I got home and I tried to read the book I got really emotional and I started crying.
-
I love talking to my friends at uni and seeing what they are doing. They're just finishing their dissertations, and I kind of wish I could live their life for a second. I wish my school days could have dragged on a little longer, or that I could go back and do it later in life.
-
I do believe in happy-ever-after.
-
Of course, the simple explanation of the fact is that marriage is the most important act of man's life in Europe or America, and that everything depends upon it.
-
Religions have always stressed that compassion is not only central to religious life, it is the key to enlightenment and it the true test of spirituality. But there have always have been those who'd rather put easier goals, like doctrine conformity, in place.
-
The real guys that I knew were really cool people, who I played basketball with and traveled with on teams and knew their families and knew that they love their family. They just happen to do something that wasn't all the way legal, but it was a part of their life, and you knew that they hustled.
-
And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good.
-
There are very little things in this life I cannot afford and patience is one of them.
-
Above all things, reverence yourself.
-
You retire, but you're still aching to play. But in order to play, you have to resist certain temptations, and train hard. And I just didn't have the desire to do that any more.
-
I don't mind that Bill Gates is a mega zillionaire; he's done a lot of really interesting and innovative stuff. I do mind that a lot of unworthy people rode his coattails to minizillionaire status, e.g. the inventor of Hungarian notation, probably the dumbest widely-promulgated idea in the history of the field.
-
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.
