Quotes from Elif Batuman

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.

Why was "plain" a euphemism for "ugly," when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that here beauty was one of the most important things about her - something having to do with who she really was.

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.

What did you bring your host family?' 'Chocolate.' 'Chocolate.' She sighed. 'I'm afraid I'll accidentally eat it all before I get there,' I said, following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn't resist chocolate.

It's so rare in the world to meet somebody you connect to. Most people are so awful. In the big picture, bad breath just seems relatively manageable.

I felt every level, graphemic, morphological, and semantic, and they all hurt.

A few times I saw a chicken walking around importantly, like some kind of a regional manager.

When you walk around, you have all this stuff rattling around in your head, things that have happened to you, things you have read. Life is just life, and you get what you get out of it.

Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources.

When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things.

Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided.

A lot of fiction doesn't answer a question that any reasonable person would ever ask.

Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'

When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him.

To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.

The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.

Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.

'Constructed Worlds' comes from a novel draft that I wrote in my early twenties and reread/revised only in my late thirties.

When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul's old city alone. It's hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

I try really hard to cultivate the pure love of reading, to make time for it, because it would be really sad to still be a writer without remembering why, on some visceral, emotional level.

Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again.

For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood.