Quotes from Elif Batuman

But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year–maybe as many as seven years–to learn to feel nineteen.

The world looked particularly crisp and etched-out in the sunlight.

I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did - someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity.

Nobody ever said we were put on this earth for our own entertainment

In fact I had no historical consciousness in those days, and no interest in acquiring one. It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way. Why be a slave to the arbitrary truth? I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years – it took the experience of lived time – to realize that they really are the same thing.

Deep down I have a talent for well-being.

Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so much that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back-promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You're going to die without it. You're never going to get it. You're going to die. Here it is.

He left before she woke up—because of how disgusted he was by women's tears and prayers, "which change everything yet are really of no consequence." I thought about that a lot: about what she could have said that would have been of consequence.

Why was that the thing you had to do when you saw a girl: to prosecute whether and in what way she was beautiful—as Lara, I realized, was? With guys, some of them were physically repellent or appealing, but a lot of them initially presented as neutral, and there wasn't that immediate, urgent-feeling cognitive puzzle to slot them in, as there was with literally every female person, including one's own self, in windows and storefronts.

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.

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.

I grew up hearing that if it hadn't been for Ataturk, my grandmother would have been 'a covered person' who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher.

The implication of "good riddance"—that love would switch off, like an electric light, once you realized the object of your love was dumb, or cowardly, or had bad taste—was not strictly borne out by observation.

Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life.

Was there a version of "The Seducer's Diary" where they were equal—where he wasn't tricking her into doing something she didn't want? Or was that what seduction was?

Now we already lived in different buildings, and soon we would live even farther away from each other, and she would be married, and I would never wait for her in her bedroom again. How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other's rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries.

I couldn't imagine viewing Bill's presence on Earth as any kind of a miracle, but wasn't that itself the miracle—that love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up according to how quantifiably lovable they were?

I wasn't interested in society, or ancient people's money troubles. I wanted to know what books really meant.

It turned out that they already had enough ESL teachers and what they needed was people to teach high school equivalency math. I wasn't particularly interested in high school math acquisition, but nobody ever said we were put on this earth for our own entertainment.

I picked up a secondhand copy—$7.99—and read the text on the back: "Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically." My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?

Winter drew to a close. Gray dull snowbanks began melting to reveal all kinds of half-frozen garbage. The air smelled of dirt. You were always tripping over dead birds. Daffodils came up, just in time to be crippled by a late snowfall, which turned immediately into slush.

Another saying, "The egg didn't like its shell," was used for people who tried to distance themselves from where they came from, or who disrespected their parents.

It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. 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.

So what do you think about love?' I asked Mesut in a casual tone. 'Love is to get caught on something,' he said readily. 'It's to be unable to forget.