Elif Batuman Quotes
Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.
Quotes to Explore
-
I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism.
-
For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.
-
Ten men waiting for me at the door? Send one of them home, I'm tired.
-
I'm from Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, if you say, 'I'm dangerous', you'd better be dangerous.
-
For years, Judaism has been a sort of product put on the religious shelf, and on holidays, we would take it off the shelf and let seculars play with it for a bit. Now, Judaism is going back to being something that more closely touches everyone.
-
I love adventure sports. And, I love cooking.
-
Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop.
-
Corruption is in society and in every strata of society.
-
It's not like I've ever been the popular pretty girl at school or anything. I was always such a weirdo.
-
What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.
-
Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.
-
Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism.
-
Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.
-
We all understand it's a privilege just to be playing in this league.
-
I love playing sports. I'm overly eager and aggressive and not very skilled, so it leads to many small injuries.
-
I would love to be a professional athlete. When I was living in Mexico as a teenager, I did seven years of gymnastics and went to the Junior Olympics. I was getting to the level of going to the international competitions, but I was only 14, and my parents were really worried because they did not want that to be my life.
-
You can stroke people with words.
-
I used homeopathy, acupuncture, yoga and meditation in conjunction with my chemotherapy to help me get stronger again after the cancer. I also chanted with Buddhist friends and prayed with Christian friends. I covered all my bases.
-
What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?
-
You always have to be on at times, and occasionally people get upset if you say no to a picture when you're eating dinner or something, and that's kind of the hard part. Or if you get crazy rumors that swirl around you from time to time that are just silly.
-
The country's present supply of foreign news depends largely on how best a number of dry goods merchants in New York think they can sell underwear.
-
They killed my character off and as God would have it, just when they told me I would never work again, I got cast in a little program called Roots, and as they would say, the rest is history.
-
When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.
-
Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.
