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Elif Batuman

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Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time. - Elif Batuman
#Counting
#Holiday
#Power
#Spooky
#Time
When in doubt, it is better to do the less conservative thing and to err on the side of the more colorful, possibly terrible mistake. That comes from thinking of yourself as a writer. - Elif Batuman
#Better
#Mistake
#Thinking
#Yourself
I felt grateful to Ataturk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren't held back by superstition or religion, that they were true scientists who taught me how to read when I was three and never doubted that I could become a writer. - Elif Batuman
#Grateful
#Me
#Parents
#Religion
#True
There are very few things that I have any patience for that are not at least a little bit humorous. - Elif Batuman
#Little Bit
#Little
#Patience
#Things
My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing. - Elif Batuman
#Age
#Education
#Medical
#Mom
#Parents
My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey's top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers and professors. - Elif Batuman
#Born
#Country
#Medical
#Parents
#School
When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things. - Elif Batuman
#Alone
#Ashamed
#Crowd
#Feel
#Nobody
Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided. - Elif Batuman
#Life
#My Life
#Pain
#Shame
#Thinking
For a Nabokov fan, paging through 'Fine Lines,' which includes a critical introduction and several essayistic evaluations of Nabokov's scientific oeuvre, can feel a bit like reading the second half of 'Pale Fire': one is confronted by a content-rich, almost dementedly tangential commentary on an increasingly inscrutable work. - Elif Batuman
#Feel
#Fire
#Introduction
#Lines
#Work
I like to think that I know a lot of words, but I definitely don't know all of them. - Elif Batuman
#Definitely
#Know
#Like
#Think
#Words
I enjoy a good meal as much as anyone, but I get so confused by nutritional, budgetary, ecological, ethical, aesthetic, and time-management concerns that I often subsist for weeks on instant oatmeal and multivitamins. - Elif Batuman
#Aesthetic
#Confused
#Enjoy
#Good
#Meal
Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again. - Elif Batuman
#Lost
#Me
#Remembered
#Search
#Time
I grew up hearing that if it hadn't been for Ataturk, my grandmother would have been 'a covered person' who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher. - Elif Batuman
#Man
#Person
#School
#She
#Teacher
#Thesis
It's possible to watch 'Gone Girl' and feel that you have seen something terribly bleak. But it's also possible to receive it as good news. Any powerful articulation of the need for change is also a testimony to the possibility of change. - Elif Batuman
#Change
#Feel
#Good News
#Good
#News
People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time. - Elif Batuman
#Clothes
#Living
#Love
#People
#Time
Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. - Elif Batuman
#Bad
#Everyone
#Get
#System
#Writing
'Constructed Worlds' comes from a novel draft that I wrote in my early twenties and reread/revised only in my late thirties. - Elif Batuman
#Draft
#Early
#Late
#Only
#Thirties
Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive. - Elif Batuman
#Hardest
#Mystery
#Tried
#Up
#Who
Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't turn off. We're also thinking about pizza or passing a slow tractor or making a turn, and for a magical instant, our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars. - Elif Batuman
#Earth
#Stars
#Thinking
#Time
#World
Awkwardness comes from the realization that, when you look around the world, it's difficult to identify anyone who isn't either the victim or the beneficiary of injustice. - Elif Batuman
#Difficult
#Injustice
#Look
#Who
#World
When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him. - Elif Batuman
#Anger
#Drama
#Life
#Looking
#Passion
Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in the celebration of the New Year, a holiday of numbers imposed on things, with lists, as well as with Advent calendars and songs like 'The Twelve Days of Christmas.' - Elif Batuman
#Christmas
#Fitness
#New
#Numbers
#Time
At the beginning of 'A Christmas Carol,' Scrooge embodies one of the central tenets of depression: that one has always been this way - and always will be. - Elif Batuman
#Always
#Beginning
#Christmas
#Way
#Will
For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood. - Elif Batuman
#Adult
#Childhood
#Christmas
#Life
#Story
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