Quotes from Elif Batuman

Sometimes, when I caught that glimmer of promise, I tried to touch myself to see if I could have an orgasm. It never quite worked. Afterward, when Mesut had gone into that weird trance, I wondered if I should get up and go to the bathroom and try to do it by myself in peace. But it always felt like more hassle than it was worth.

I couldn't help thinking it was wasteful for people with such good logic skills to spend so many years and so much energy learning to reconcile an old book with the way things were now. Couldn't a person just write a new book?

It was impossible not to think that her beauty was one of the most important things about her–something having to do with who she really was.

but I couldn't see him or talk to him because he didn't love me. I couldn't be with him for one minute, not even for the weird leftover hours that nobody else wanted, like from one to three a.m. on a Wednesday." "'In Turkey? You wouldn't have a nervous breakdown. You'd give them a nervous breakdown.' I forgave him for a lot when he said that. I forgave him for almost everything.

A literature major whom I knew slightly was walking her lame boyfriend around on a leash.

Love wasn't a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had heath in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

But I had never doubted that, when I got back to school, I would find an email from him, explaining everything. It was not, after all, conceivable that there was no explanation, or that the explanation could come from anyone else, or that it could come in any way other than email, since that was how everything had always happened between us.

A low bluish cloudbank was rapidly encroaching over the starry black vault of the sky.

Back in Cambridge, the bank clock read 8:40. We went to Ivan's dining hall. The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered.

It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything—though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.

Pale fibrous clouds lay on the surface of the sky, which resembled a dark blue inverted bowl. The moon was a perfect white disk. In the window of the café, the men, tables, bottles, and a piano stood out as sharply as a scene in a movie. Some distance away, on the other side of the station entrance, stood a glowing phone booth.

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.

At the T stop, I stared fixedly ahead, as tears streamed down my face, and my nasal passages shut down. Was this the "work" you had to do? Was I getting better?

A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there's no closure, it doesn't stop, and it's this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read," wrote Hélène Cixous, in a sentence that could definitely have been shorter.

Okay. Now, don't let any of this lower your mirth index. Think of Tamerlane." My grandfather used to comfort my mother, during her childhood, by reminding her that they might have been related to Tamerlane. "Okay," I said, though I had never seen how Tamerlane helped anything. "Remember, you have the best heart and mind, and whatever you do is right. Bye-bye, my sweet. Don't forget the fruit group.

I don't see Peter," Own said, coming out of the turnstile behind me. But I van was there, reading a paperback novel. The book looked so small in his hands, almost unstable, like it might crumble to dust. He had a tan and looked at once different from my memory and unmistakably himself. I was so happy that the first thing I said to him instead of hello was "Thank you.

Most government majors belonged to a social type known as "gov jocks.

but even with Varenka, Koznyshev almost proposed to her when they were picking mushrooms. Koznyshev had therefore at least contemplated having sex with Varenka. There were no women in that book with whom nobody thought about having sex.

Of course, you couldn't have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable.

Why was it so hard not to glance through an open door, even when you didn't want to see inside?

The train came into sight, rumbling closer, bringing the feeling of aliveness and plenitude inherent to incoming trains.

I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing and why.

You wouldn't have a nervous breakdown. You'd give them a nervous breakdown." I forgave him for a lot when he said that. I forgave him for almost everything.

The flight was delayed two hours. I had never been unaccompanied in the international terminal before, and wandered around for a while reading my horoscope in magazines and looking in all the shops. Brookstone was selling a "quiet hair dryer" that let you hold a phone conversation while blow-drying your hair, without the other person knowing.