Elif Batuman Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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When Occupy Wall Street happened, I took my money out of Citibank. I already had problems with all the banks - Citibank, Bank of America - but I was kind of just too lazy to take my money out until I saw how Citibank responded to Occupy Wall Street.
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Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway.
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Right now, I'm not really thinking about marriage.
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You can be an Olympic champion in 9.5 secs, but to be the greatest, there's more to it. It takes a bit of forethought and a lot of mental application.
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I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.
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I'm not very good in crowds, so I usually try to become as small as possible.
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A Persian army being then subject to great inconveniences, for their horses are tied and generally shackled to prevent them from running away, and if an alarm happens, a Persian has the housing to fix, his horse to bridle, and his corslet to put on before he can mount.
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I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.
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I think sometimes if you are too interested in day-to-day politics, you lose sight of the long term.
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I'm lucky because I don't like being in the sun a whole lot, just because the repercussions for me - I feel it, I go very red.
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Whenever I did sitcoms, that always happened on your show. Once the show was on the air, it takes on a life of its own. It develops, and it becomes something else.
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I want to lay all my cards out on the table and walk away with no regrets.
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I go to all these photo shoots, and each time I figure out something new about myself and what I want to wear.
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Those boos really motivate me to make something happen.
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I auditioned in Chicago for Juilliard and didn't get in. I was basically living in a back room of my parents' house, paying rent and not doing anything with my life. I'd like to say it was patriotic to join the Marines, but it was also that I was doing nothing honorable with my life and spending too much time at McDonald's.
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I think that's like the age-old psychological core issue for any situation. Anybody who has had an experience with a parent that is absent, it's going to manifest.
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There are actors who aren't on the cover of magazines but still decide what work they want and when they want it. I want a family one day. So I dream of really being able to decide when to work and when not to.
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When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It's like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.
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No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth.
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People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'
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Writing songs is kind of like a wrestling match to me. You have to pin it down and make it do what you want it to do.
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There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
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There are no right answers to wrong questions.
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Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system.
