Inspirational Quotes, Motivational Sayings, and Wise Words for Daily Inspiration

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I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the version you would come up with would be unsociable, lame, and basically less beautiful than the truth.

Elif Batuman's Popular Quotes

When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that somethin…

- Elif Batuman

There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

- Elif Batuman

I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever d…

- Elif Batuman

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his fav…

- Elif Batuman

As a grad student and later as a writer, I have found it hard to sustain the pure, almost erotic love of reading I had as a kid - you know, where you…

- Elif Batuman

If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval chivalric romance, when actually he lives in six…

- Elif Batuman

There's an amazing line in Marcus Aurelius: "The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the…

- Elif Batuman

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

- Elif Batuman

I think it's true that, as is often observed, the writer is always an outsider. A writer is someone who is telling stories about what's going on, whi…

- Elif Batuman