Elif Batuman Quotes

I had a lot of friends, but none of them I felt super close with. Now that I'm older, I can look back on my teenage self and kind of see the things I did wrong and the things I did right, what affect they had on me, and what affect they had on other people. I can look at it in a much more conducive way to storytelling.

I get sillier as I get older, so I don't know what wisdom means. I can only pass on something that I've been acquainted with and let whomever it is pick the bones out of it

I always say my age is connected with three Cs. In here, cuore, which means the heart. Up here, cervello, which is the brain. And, of course, down here: the coglioni. I no feel my age, I tell you.

After fifty most of the bullshit is gone.

You are more thoughtful because you don't act as quickly anymore. When I turned 70 it was the first time I felt young for my age. Fifty dropped on me like a ton of bricks - there is something about that number - but when 70 came along I felt good about it.

So, when you have that experienced knowledge you lose the ability to hurt people and you also lose the ability to be hurt by people. That's love.

The courage of all one really knows comes but late in life.

I'm trying to grow older with wisdom.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. See what happens when you "know it all", at any stage of life? Farther down the track you may see clearly how certain personal opinions, held onto too tightly, could be fogging up the view, and providing incorrect insight. Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

I do believe that as you write more and age, the arrogance and most of the vanity goes. Or it is a vanity met with vast gratitude, that you were hit by something as you stood in the way of it, that anybody is listening.

It's a good thing I learned some humility and perspective as I got older.

I want to savor the aging process. As you get older, you trade your innocence for wisdom and the wisdom is your reward.

One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.

It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.

As you get older, though, you realize there are fire extinguishers. You do have an ability to control the flames.

The things that you know intellectually when you're young become internalized as you get older. You realize all those clichés.

You become more and more charged with your life and with a life that you're observing. When I was younger, I was actually looking forward to getting older, to have more insight, more understanding. I'm much more tolerant with others and with myself. I'm not in rebellion all the time, I'm not angry so much. But all those feelings are really useful [when you're young] because they fire us, as long as they don't get out of control.

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

The older I get, the more I feel.

My age makes all my wrinkles and gray hair make sense.

I wish," he said, "I had known at eighteen what I know now - that there are some things on which one does not compromise.

Age does not bring wisdom... but it does give perspective... and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you've resisted.

A man of over thirty might be held to be at the height of his powers, but not necessarily of his wisdom.