Quotes from Elif Batuman

I wondered if Ivan was asleep. It was terrible to think that he was in this city, possibly very nearby, 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.

On the way to the train station, my mother said that she wasn't going to wash my sheets after I left. Sometimes, she said, she slept in my bed for one or two nights, because the bed still smelled like me. She smiled conspiratorially, and I felt my heart constrict.

I understood that the rest of my life would consist of causing Ivan to lug that suitcase in and out of his mother's old car, for all our days.

In the car, my father asked if I agreed with him that there was nothing worse, ethically, than betrayal, and that women were particularly prone to betraying people. Clytemnestra, for example, had betrayed Agamemnon when he had one foot out of the bath, fulfilling the prophecy that Agamemnon would die neither on land nor at sea.

learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which said that the language you spoke affected how you processed reality.

real intimacy is a place where there are no mistakes, at least not in the sense you feel. You don't just blow everything with one wrong move. A friendship is a space where you're supported and free to make mistakes. I think when you reach this understanding a lot of things are going to feel better for you.

Whenever I'm worried about anything,' said this guy Ben, 'I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important.' I acknowledged that this was a great comfort.

At two-thirty I was wide awake. I knew there was no way I would fall back asleep, not for hours. I put on sweatpants and went downstairs to the computer room. The only light came from the Coke machine and the "Flying Through Space" screensaver. I put six dimes in the machine and a can tumbled out like a body falling down the stairs.

As long as there are beginning-English students and a lake and I can see a mountain, I will be perfectly happy," she said, reminding me of how my grandfather used to say he was a simple man with simple tastes: "All I need is a little milk from a goat that has been fed for a month on wild green pears.

It seemed possible that one or both of these books might change my life.

The hours I had spent like that, making my fingers simper at each other. I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

And yet, the second time had blocked out the first time, and I didn't like to think that it hadn't been the first time.

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick facades glowed pink, and everything blue got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

There was only one editor I recognized, Lakshmi, who was also a freshman and lived in my building. All I knew about her was that she was beautiful, did drugs, spoke with a British accent, and had grown up in different foreign countries. She seemed really impressed that I had won this prize. "Still waters run deep," she kept saying.

In a black room with orange lights and pounding Spanish music we stood in a big circle dancing. It reminded me of preschool, when you also had to stand in a circle and clap your hands. I began to intuit dimly why people drank when they went dancing, and it occurred to me that maybe the reason preschool had felt the way it had was that one had had to go through the whole thing sober.

It occurred to me that I could be less mindful of man, and I seemed to catch a glimpse of freedom.

Dread clenched my stomach. I liked that I had won a contest and that they had thought I was a boy, and I was glad about the fifty dollars. But I didn't want my story to be published, or to read from it. I didn't want anyone to think I thought it was good.

Go to hell." Io said. Rudolf nodded. Then he picked up his raincoat, turned around, and went to hell. Up to then, I hadn't been impressed by the quality of the writing, but that ending blew me away. He turned around, picked up his raincoat, and went to hell.

They didn't take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn't challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn't know how to do anything real. I didn't know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn't just a self-improvement project.

What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn't a crush, but love. "A crush is about building up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you're secure with, to give to the other person." I silently absorbed the implication that what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn't have a self I was secure with.

On the plus side, Matt was good-natured and didn't have a self-esteem problem, so you didn't have to deal with him blaming you for making him feel stupid. On the other hand, the minute you tried to talk about anything interesting, he would swiftly, good-naturedly, inexorably change the subject back to one of the three kinds of things he ever talked about.

What about the rest of the family? Did you meet them, too?" I explained that I had met everyone except the sister in Transylvania and the sister at the hospital. My mother sighed. "He will want to marry you," she said. "I'm very concerned. That's what it means when men want you to meet their sisters." "Don't worry, nobody wants to marry me," I said. But somewhere inside, a tiny part of me felt a thrill.

At a newsstand, Owen read a German newspaper while Vivie and I paged through the Hungarian fashion magazines, and discussed how the models looked less tormented than models in American magazines. "Maybe it's like how, in cultures where everyone is starving, the standard of beauty is less skinny," Vivie said. We both looked for a moment at the confident Hungarian women, each of whom knew tens of thousands of the words closest to Ivan.

When he leaned in to kiss me, it was like sliding back into the water on one of those long days at the beach, where you just get out so you can go back in again.