Goodness Quotes
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'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
For me, the terror of the zombie is that at any moment, your friend, your family, you neighbor, your teacher, the guy at the bodega down the street, can be revealed as the monster they've always been.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I was 7 years old when 'Roots' was first broadcast, and my parents gathered all us kids around the TV to learn about how we got here. But it wasn't until I sat down and immersed myself in the research that I got the barest inkling of what it meant to be a slave.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
The idea of sacrifice is integral to the John Henry myth. Heroic figures have to die in order for us to have our stories; we live and stand on their bones.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Anytime an African-American writes an unconventional novel, the writer gets compared to Ellison. But that's O.K. I am working in the African-American literary tradition. That's my aim and what I see as my mission.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Part of any book is establishing the rules at the end of the world. My first book, 'The Intuitionist,' takes place in an alternative world where elevator inspectors are important, so you have to establish rules, and part of that is, How do people talk? How do they behave?
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Most of my books have always worked through juxtaposition, jumping through different point of views and time.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I wrote a book of essays about New York called 'The Colossus of New York,' but it's not about - you know, when I'm writing about rush hour or Central Park, it's not a black Central Park, it's just Central Park, and it's not a black rush hour, it's just rush hour.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I like to explore different ideas of race, how the concept of race has evolved in the country. It's one thing I enjoy talking about, but I don't feel compelled to talk about it.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I always try to mix it up with each book - changing tone, changing style keeps the work very vital for me.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Some people don't like my fiction, because they prefer the nonfiction. But moving around keeps the work fresh for me and, hopefully, for my one or two readers who follow me from book to book!
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Tolstoy didn't know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In 'Anna Karenina,' nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue about. But that's - anyway that's how I was brought up, so it would be odd for me to suddenly just up and start wearing a headscarf.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Even when I was very small, my mother treated me like a great novelist. She was like: 'Oh, I'm sitting at the breakfast table with Flaubert,' and would say, if she burned some food or was late arriving, 'Don't put this in your novel!'
Quote by -Elif Batuman
There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
'Constructed Worlds' comes from a novel draft that I wrote in my early twenties and reread/revised only in my late thirties.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I like to think that I know a lot of words, but I definitely don't know all of them.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I have always known my mother as an agnostic, less certain than my father that the universe hadn't been created by some great intelligence. But she would get even more annoyed than my father did when she thought that people were invoking God to do their jobs for them - for example, when she saw a bus with a sticker saying 'Allah Protect Us.'
Quote by -Elif Batuman