Elif Batuman Quotes

Your understanding of what you read and hear is, to a very large degree, determined by your vocabulary, so improve your vocabulary daily.

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

It would not be wise for us to say we know what we don't know.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

I'm not going to pretend to know one more thing than I know.

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes.

I know what I know, and what I don't know, I'm willing to admit.

I know what I know and I also know what I don't know, and I make sure I hire the right people who can teach me.

I actually tried to learn the dictionary at one point. It didn't work; I only got through the first few pages.

Kids in school told me my parents had accents, but I had no idea; they've always sounded that way to me.

One of my bywords is that nobody knows anything, including me.

There are a lot of words that I knew first as a reader, and I never put the pieces together in my brain. The word segue I thought was pronounced "seeg," I think until I went to college, which is horribly embarrassing.

I know what I can know, and am not troubled about what I cannot know.

Know what you know and know that you don't know what you don't know — that is the characteristic of one who knows.

We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.

Intellectual modesty is humility as to what I know; intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know

One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.

How can we remember our ignorance, which our growth requires, when we are using our knowledge all the time?

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

The dear good people don't know how long it takes to learn to read. I've been at it eighty years, and can't say yet that I've reached the goal.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

There are questions I'm still not wise enough to answer, just wise enough to no longer ask.

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.