Quotes from Elif Batuman

I think I'm falling in love with you. Every day it's harder for me to see the common denominator, to understand what counts as a thing. All the categories that make up a dog—they go blurry and dissolve, I can't tell what anything is anymore. Chills go up the backs of my arms and songs go around my head. "[If I Must Be Put to Death, Let It Be] by Your Aristocratic Little Hand.

The sky looked like a loaf of glowing grayish laundry that someone had washed with a red shirt.

Why were we all so bad at writing stories? When would it get better?

I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said "you can feel the food." That was how Owen would end up with students who said "savor," while I would end up with students who said "papel iss blonk.

It wasn't that I hadn't known these things, but that at some point, without realizing it, I had persuaded myself that I was different—that my honesty and non-lameness wouldn't be punished like that, because I had some special skill, some self-sufficiency, an ability to be alone. I always had been alone, when every other person in my family had insisted on having someone around to have sex with.

He felt to me increasingly like the parody of a love interest.

Lakshmi had assured me, when I pointed it out, that the insufferability of clubs was widely acknowledged. Why else did I think everyone was on drugs the whole time? My reluctance to talk to the guy you had to talk to to get the drugs was exceeded only by my mistrust of the drugs themselves. If I messed up my brain, what else did I have? Why wasn't Lakshmi scared?

Part of the way of the world was that women had a tendency to go crazy. Men could bring out this tendency. But to blame the men was to take sides, to lose logic, to enter the craziness of the women—because the very content of the women's craziness was, in large part, the blameworthiness of the men.

Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.

Weeping, a powerful physical process that was normally out of the question, became a constant possibility.

For some reason she leaves a very strong impression on me. She looks exactly how I picture Nadja, André Breton's Nadja.

Riley made me a tape of her Fiona Apple album.

I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.

There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.

I didn't identify with anyone in any paintings.

In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought, and to deploy these thoughts in relation to the things that other people said, while exercising caution to not betray ignorant or antisocial ideas, and the whole thing had been so much to think about that in the end I usually hadn't said anything at all.

I couldn't imagine what it would mean for an angle to be impossible to trisect. If a thing existed, couldn't you cut it in three? The professor started sketching diagrams and equations on the board. I copied everything in my notebook. Ivan was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. There was a ragged spot in his jeans just below the knee. It made a much stronger impression on me than the proof about angles.

Microsoft Word was for kids, but the typewriter was God, the desk shook with each keystroke.

I went on to the balcony, lit a cigarette, and looked at the museum, wondering whether it would still be there in a thousand years. When would it not be there anymore?

Isabel's friend Henrietta showed up, wanting Isabel to marry a square-jawed American who charismatically ran his father's cotton factory.

One must always be thinking," Isabel told Ralph. "I am not sure it's not a greater happiness to be powerless." And Ralph replied: "For weak people I have no doubt it's a greater happiness.'' It was a confirmation of my own idea of strength—of my determination to be strong.

It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What's the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too. It would be like one of those Marguerite Duras books I tried to read in Svetlana's aunt's apartment. Elle pleure. Il pleure. Ils pleurent, tous les deux.

How confident the other people in the class seemed to be in the rights that had been conferred on them by being there first—which was really only a matter of luck, because their aunts hadn't happened to call just then. Where, exactly, did they want me to go? Did they want me to just not exist? Was that how the Israelis and Palestinians felt about each other?

the way you feel annoyed toward someone in real life after they say something mean to you in a dream.