Elif Batuman Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I'm afraid one thing - I don't like heights. Heights bug me out. I'm not cool with heights. I refuse to do a comedy show 12 stories up. I'm fearless about everything else.
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America's victory in the Cold War was not without painful social costs.
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The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
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Being mean just for being mean's sake isn't funny.
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I don't meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.
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When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.
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'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.
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We need to understand what innovation will be built on top of our networks.
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I don't particularly get nervous about anything.
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Unfortunately or fortunately, in order to become acquainted with the idiom of country or rock music, it is necessary to occasionally play in a bar. Bars are a rehearsal place.
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Belief is not restricted to a brief affirmation based on imitation; rather, it has degrees and stages of development. It is like a seed growing into a fully grown, fruit-bearing tree; like the sun's image in a mirror or in a drop of water to its images on the sea's surface and to the sun itself.
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If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.
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I enjoy science, and I'm a very curious person. I always want to know the reason behind everything, big or small.
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I want kids. I want a soccer team, and I want a husband.
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Police can only act on intelligence.
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The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites' concern for him: he has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him.
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Which country in the world has the kind of talent India has in numbers?
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Yes, exercise is the catalyst. That's what makes everything happen: your digestion, your elimination, your sex life, your skin, hair, everything about you depends on circulation. And how do you increase circulation?
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I haven't read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare - except 'The Merchant of Venice' in ninth grade. I'm not familiar with 'Death of a Salesman.' I haven't read Tennessee Williams.
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Imaginary friends are one of the weirder forms of pretend play in childhood. But the research shows that imaginary friends actually help children understand the other people around them and imagine all the many ways that people could be.
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Only useless things are indispensable.
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If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.
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Once when I was 16 I had my car taken away from me for being past curfew. Oh, and I said a bad word once, and I actually did get my mouth washed out with soap.
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Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey.
