Goodness Quotes
Find one of the best and famous quote catagorized into topics like inspirational, motivations, deep, thoughtful, art, success, passion, frindship, life, love and many more.
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.'
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul's old city alone. It's hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
The Himalayan glaciers, China's trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey - the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
There's a lot to be said for an American-style liberal-arts education, which prevents young people from professionalizing right away.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I like a novel to have a certain amount of dead time and filler - unremarkable scenery, descriptions of getting from point A to point B, dialogue in which not much is said - in between the parts that are electric. With a long work that you don't read in one sitting, I think that makes for the best reading experience.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: 'Don Quixote' contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric romance and its insufficiency to account for the way real life feels when you get up in the morning in 17th-century Spain.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn't affect me very much because my parents didn't really talk about it.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
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.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
If you are in a breakup, you might as well go all the way and spend the summer in Samarkand, with no air-conditioning, learning a language you have no use for. At least it adds some romance to a depressing situation.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
A lot of fiction doesn't answer a question that any reasonable person would ever ask.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
I've developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There's a women's detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written by Aleksandra Marinina, the former chief of police.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
There are very few things that I have any patience for that are not at least a little bit humorous.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
It's kind of an embarrassing story - that's why it's called 'The Idiot.' But looking back at your past self, you see that this person had reasons for everything she did. There's a whole lot of awkwardness, but really, what should one be embarrassed about?
Quote by -Elif Batuman
People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
When you walk around, you have all this stuff rattling around in your head, things that have happened to you, things you have read. Life is just life, and you get what you get out of it.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him.
Quote by -Elif Batuman
You base your actions on a projected ending, which you actually don't know. However, when you reach the crucial point, and the pinnacle event doesn't occur, you just need to go on, and something else will happen.
Quote by -Elif Batuman