Elif Batuman Quotes

Our perception of celebrities in Hollywood is not the reality. The reality of our lives is so much like everyone else's life. We have family members we love, everyone gets up in the morning, they have three meals a day and they go about their business.

What interests me more than dramatic heroics are the domestic things: How do people do laundry and find food when the world is about to end?

Most of our lives aren't that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

It's funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.

Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.

Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.

I'm drawn to scenes in movies where you just see characters turning off lights in a room or putting the groceries away; it's like, 'I understand that.' We all have to get ready for bed, and we all do it in a different way, and yet it's all strangely familiar and strangely human.

I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; How well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

I think that paying your bills every month, that's not so glamorous or fun, having a job, or when your child gets sick. That's why when there are those special things, they are even more important and you want them to have a purpose.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.

the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?

Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we paid for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!

We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.

Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen-and then in bed, of course.

O lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.

Music reminds us that the universe loves us

My lord, they say five moons were seen to-night-- Four fixed, and the fifth did whirl about The other four in wondrous motion.

And I spilled gravy on my Carolina sweater, because I am alive.

Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.