Elif Batuman Quotes

Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

The kinds of stories I want to be a part of telling are about delving into what it is to be a human being.

The whole idea of a dream, to me, is a mystery plane. Things are operating there that tell us the real truth. The stuff going on inside us that we don't express or even know about pours out in our dreams.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

I dreamt -- marvellous error! -- that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding — a thing which is rather surmised and never spoken than known and clothed in words.

We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

I think in a way, what it is to be human is to transcend our boundaries. That is the human story.

Everybody needs to go to Mongolia just to see what it is to be a human being again.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

I dream a dream that dreams back at me.

I'm just looking for characters that continue to make me stretch and grow and learn more about the human condition.

There is no point in trying to remember your dreams ... There is only the unspeakable joy of eavesdropping on your spirit, catching tiny glimpses of its independent life, resting for a moment in its wisdom, puzzling, laughing sometimes, over what it's up to, what it makes of you.

In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude - the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.