A Quote by Elif Batuman

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly. — © Elif Batuman
At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.
I say things, but I say them indirectly. At the same time, I try to make my images as direct as possible.
A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts....Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.
A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.
You're only given as much as you can handle at any given time. Whether it's true or not, it gives you the strength.
That's why everybody loves to tune in and watch these fights, because at any given moment, any given fight, any given fighters, anything can happen. A fighter could win nine out of 10 times, but there's always that one time.
The best messages in any given negotiation are really implied indirectly, come to the other person based on thinking that you're getting them to do - getting them to get some really solid thought behind their answers. And so a great thing to send someone in an email is, 'Have you given up on this project?'
I've been compiling a list of art project ideas for a long time. These are ideas of things I would love to see someday. They range from the practical - jackets with woodstoves in them - to the sublime - images of nuns on waterslides.
The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ? there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.
When I do only images, people don't connect with the images because the images are too weird to understand. But when I explain the weird images with straight words, then all of a sudden there is a tension between the two that the audience wants to see.
As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.
Time is of the essence, particularly if we're sending images out on social media. The reality is that the majority of images are only viewed for a few seconds, often on a phone or computer. There are so many images freely available that it takes a lot of will power to concentrate and prolong the gaze on one picture at the expense of the thousands of others waiting to be viewed!
A philosophy which speaks, even indirectly, only to philosophers is no philosophy at all; and I think the same is true if it speaks only to scientists, or only to jurists, or priests, or any other special class.
You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.
I can only live in the world of truth, inasmuch as I'm able to be truthful with myself at any given point, on any given day.
From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.
One nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of the most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive.
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