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Quote by Elif Batuman

“People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.”

Quote by Elif Batuman

Author

Elif Batuman is a Turkish-American author born in 1977. Her works are known for their humor and depth, primarily exploring themes of personal identity, cultural differences, and the experience of growing up. Her debut novel, 'The Possessed', received widespread acclaim. more

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“I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever does catch up with one's actual age. Personally I feel like I just got the hang of thirty-five.”

Ifs Thinking Knows Feels Doe Age Five Identity Months Faster Thirty

Author:Elif Batuman

“If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval chivalric romance, when actually he lives in sixteenth-century Spain, which is already going through secularization, industrialization, modernization. He goes out to kill a giant, and instead he collides with this huge windmill and injures himself and also damages the windmill. I think that's a metaphor for the collisions we all have over time, as our ideas of ourselves get out of synch with the historical moment.”

Ifs Thinking Want Ideas Moments Romance Guy Century Huge Historical Metaphor Giants Damage Spain This Guy Medieval Collision Collide Industrialization Windmills Modernization

Author:Elif Batuman

“I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.”

Ifs Way Writing Important Ideas School Language Realizing Technology College Expression Communication Important Things Clarity Evolve Straightforward Grad Grad School

Author:Elif Batuman

“There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.”

Ideas Language Easy

Author:Elif Batuman

“At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.”

Author:Elif Batuman

“It's really a trade-off: you're always having to decide whether you're going to say the more ambitious thing, and lose a little clarity - or are you going to say something really clearly, and sacrifice a little nuance? Get too obscure, and you sound like a pretentious asshole; go overboard with the clarity, and you sound like you're talking down to your audience, or like you yourself are a reductive simpleton.”

Littles Sound Loses Talking Audience Sacrifice Like You Trade Clarity Ambitious Obscure Pretentious Nuance Overboard Trade Offs Simpletons Talking Down

Author:Elif Batuman

“Part of flirting is that you tend to give each other a little extra slack to be obscure - to say things that are suggestive and nuanced, rather than clear and comprehensible, things you wouldn't put up with in an essay or something written by a stranger - and that can be so exciting.”

Giving Littles Clear Written Exciting Stranger Extras Obscure Flirting Essays

Author:Elif Batuman

“Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.”

Space Credit Extras Poetry Is Like Love

Author:Elif Batuman

“Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's not necessarily their rap.”

Important Including My Favorite Rap

Author:Elif Batuman

“I think humor is a really important way of creating solidarity - like, through humor you can make people realize that certain situations, where they thought they were alone, are actually shared by everyone.”

People Thinking Way Important Certain Realizing Situation Creating Solidarity

Author:Elif Batuman