Quotes from Elif Batuman

I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

In fact I had no such interest, but I knew it was wrong to do things just because other people did. Other people couldn't be the reason why you did anything.

but at the end of class, I still felt slightly annoyed towards Ivan, the way you feel towards someone in real life after they say something mean to you in a dream. Instead of taking the stairs with him as usual, I took the elevator.

Moreover, my policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.

it was not a] circle—just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE. I thought Euclid would have been mad. "That's so typical of your attitude," Svetlana said. "You always think everyone is angry. Try to have some perspective. It's over two thousand years after his death, he's in Boston for the first time, they've named something after him—why should his first reaction be to get pissed off?

When I woke up in the morning, there was a second or two when I felt light and free, unaware of any reason to feel upset. Then all my knowledge and memories rushed back and a weight descended on my sternum and the creaking started behind my eyes.

It seems to me that your sense of other people's awfulness might be compensating for your own sense of inferiority and fear of rejection. You rationalize the rejection of your peers by telling yourself it comes from other people's deficiencies rather than your own. They can't understand your philosophy or your ideas.

I told him my theory. Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources.

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. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.

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. Elle pleure. Il pleure. Ils pleurent, tous les deux.

Lighting a match felt exciting and a little bit dangerous, and when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player—like the music was about to start.

The eternal pauper in the great marketplace of ideas and of the world, I had nothing to teach anyone. I didn't have anything anyone wanted.

knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish

He asked if I had liked the book in English. I wondered whether to lie. "No," I said. "Maybe I should read it again." "Uh-huh," Ivan said. "So that's how it works for you?" "How what works?" "You read a book and don't like it, and then you read it again?

Europe was so small. It seemed weird that people took it so seriously.

You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.

There was a poem with that mood by Pasternak: "Don't sleep, don't sleep, artist." It sounded better in Russian, because the word for "artist" had three syllables, it was an amphibrach, like "spaghetti," or "appendix." Don't sleep, don't sleep, gorilla, I thought as I went down the elevator to the subway platform.

How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?

It was weird what was enough to make you feel good or bad, even though your basic life circumstances were the same.

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 learned a lot from that, like how much it hurt to see how other people described you, and how things that you said about another person, especially your parents, seemed neutral when addressed to a third party, but lethal when you thought about your parents reading it.

Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.

It's so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious,' she said. 'I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you've swallowed the universe? Not say so?

Well, that's just it, I thought: you didn't just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That's what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.