Quotes from Elif Batuman

At the same time, it seemed certain to me that someday I would really want to hear his voice and wouldn't be able to, and I would think back to the time that he had invited me to call him, and it would seem as incomprehensible as an invitation to speak to the dead.

I had listened to my Walkman while reading Père Goriot. Père Goriot's previous owner, Brian Kennedy, had systematically underlined what seemed to be the most meaningless and disconnected sentences in the whole book. Thank God I wasn't in love with Brian Kennedy, and didn't feel any mania to decipher his thoughts.

Everything looked strangely isolated, as if each item in the landscape had been purchased separately from a catalog.

Obviously all the girls, whether they talked about it or not, were on the lookout for any reprieve from the hassle of not having a boyfriend: the way it exposed you to censure and nosiness.

He said that we had forgotten the clowns, who now performed only in prisons and insane asylums. The implication was that this was a bad thing.

I had wanted to become a novelist before I even knew how to read, back when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough. They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored.

I understood that novels, unlike children's books, were serious and important and that, just as my parents' job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone's job to write novels. Every civilized country had such people. They were in some way the very mark of civilization.

He was the only other Turkish person I had ever met who was actually interested in some specific field of knowledge, and who wasn't just automatically doing medicine, engineering, or the thing they called "management.

Wasn't that how people in other countries viewed all American people—with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift? With the way they were protected—the way I was protected—from so much of the "reality" that happened elsewhere?

Fiona Apple's album made me more immediately depressed than any other music I remembered hearing.

There were two grad students, Burcu and Ula?, who sometimes came to the club meetings to circulate petitions about the Armenian genocide. They were really stressful people—not just about the petitions, but about everything. You could see exactly what their parents were like.

The boy who convinced you to go to Hungary, he must be very handsome," Svetlana's aunt Bojana told me. "You can find an excellent coffee in Budapest. I see that you are looking at my tea tray. Do you like it? It's quite a good tray. I will make it a gift to you. But not now—only when you get married.

I turned my copy over to reread the back cover: always a creepy experience once you had finished a book, like getting a message from a dead person. "Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written," it said.

This is the first real conversation we're having and already I'm burdening you with my emotional baggage.

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

and I could hear from his voice that he was smiling. He was happy that I hurt like that. And I knew I had felt the same happiness, anytime he mentioned feeling hurt by me. Why was it fun for us to make each other suffer? Did that mean it wasn't love? Surely that wasn't what love was?

Sometimes I fantasize about being an analyst," Svetlana said, "but when I brought it up to my shrink, he said I'd be terrible. He said I'd never let the patient get a word in edgewise.

Last spring, months before we had to declare our majors, Svetlana had started soliciting advice from her parents and other old people.

But, for some reason, the laws of their universe didn't allow them to openly oppose you. All they would do was smile fixedly and try to tell you not to take so many classes and, if you smiled fixedly back for long enough, they would eventually sign the petition.

so I preferred to take highly specific classes with interesting titles, even when I hadn't taken the prerequisites and had no idea what was going on. I could see how my way might be called aesthetic.

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.

People said you had to be careful whom you lost your virginity to, because you would become attached, you would want to do it again, you would never get over it. Indeed, even though it had been one of the most painful experiences of my life, still what I felt toward him was something like gratitude, and a feeling of submission that was hard to differentiate from desire—because you had to submit to something.

The list of frequently used nouns included: struggle for peace, woman, love, constitution, deputy, congress, delegation, friend, mother, little girl, salmon, sturgeon, red (black) caviar, champagne, vodka, watermelon, cherry, sour cherry, horseradish, and beefsteak. "Fini!" exclaimed Piri happily: she was done gluing the mirror.

Malin opened the glass sliding door and the dog sailed out over the dunes and started doing everything at once: peeing and frolicking and scrabbling in the sand. There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.