Elif Batuman Quotes
Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'
Quotes to Explore
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Violin playing is a physical art with great traditions behind it.
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I tested for a couple of pilots, but they said I was too tall.
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Awards for arts, where you make comparisons, don't make much sense.
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The tragedy of all of this is that it happened to me and it shouldn't have happened. It ruined my life and my career. That's the tragedy of this.
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I'll tell you sort of an odd story: My music taste changed on 9/11. And it's very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn't like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me.
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I believe in the impossible because no one else does.
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I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the history. I've never been to Iran. I've never even been inside a mosque.
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I've performed Schoenberg's 'Pierrot lunaire' many times.
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Being gay myself, I'm naturally drawn to the interactions between men rather than men and women.
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People weren't buying as many records. My record company did not want me. I went through three record companies, went on tour at the wrong time. It destroyed me.
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I love being a father. It's one of my big jobs is just being a parent. It's one of my favorite things I do.
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Because women have been marginalised, they're more likely to behave like immigrants and continue to push themselves forward in order to avoid falling through the cracks, but I don't think a happy ending comes from matriarchy.
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To be seen and to be respected for my work and acknowledged as a true American Latina... means a lot to me.
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While prices of goods continue to rise, American worker's wages remain stagnant.
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I played ping-pong with Prince. That's pretty surreal. He gave me a lesson before we played; like, he's great. He's a master at it, so I took the free lesson.
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I do watch 'American Idol' sometimes. It's not really that pleasurable... I take that back. It is the epitome of a guilty pleasure. Sometimes there's some good singers on that show.
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I really hate drama. It's draining; it's mentally draining. It's a waste of time.
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Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
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A school out of Canberra sends me a term's worth of work. I sit on the couch by myself and complete it and send it back.
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My father was a small-town banker. He became very ill when I was 10 years old, and we went to California three years later in an attempt to recover his health, which never happened.
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Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn't enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was - the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips - seemed to always prevail and attract Dad's disdain.
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Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'
