Quotes from Elif Batuman

I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn't understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations.

Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life. I thought that was the point of writing stories: to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood—for how it came about and for what it led to.

Every morning I called Aeroflot to ask about my suitcase. "Oh, it's you," sighed the clerk. "Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase *resignation of the soul*?

It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea.

For dinner she made a soup called "boy-catching soup" and a cake called "mother-in-law cake." These two dishes seemed to sum up a whole worldview of entrapment and placation.

I felt a wave of nausea to realize that I had propagated these stories just by telling Svetlana what was going on—just because I had wanted to tell some other person the basic events of my own life.

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for?

I had a slab of German chocolate cake the size of a child's tombstone. Ralph

In the rearview mirror I saw Ivan half running behind the car, and I felt despair and envy. Of course he couldn't love me, not when I lived through so many layers, when I was spooked by Montmartre, and wore a seat belt in order to steer a car out of a ditch.

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get—you will get it someday." I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. "Yes, you will get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

It's 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?

I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.

That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities

I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia's alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money.

The thing with the Rolexes is amazing, amazing, Ivan wrote. Light, he said, seemed to sweep, but quantum theory said it ticked. Waves were the combination of sweeping and ticking. Could true sweeping ever happen on this Earth of ours? Maybe one could do sweeping math, og sweeping sex. Sweeping was beautiful, but powerless. Energy came from ticking - the capacity for rapid change. Immortality was sweeping. Lives coming and going, generations, years, minutes, seconds: all are on the fake Rolex.

I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

as for unhappy families, star-crossed lovers, and exiled heroes, they are simply universal.

Each work of criticism is supposed to build on the body of work, to increase the total sum of human understanding. It's not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It's supposed to be cumulative - it believes in progress.

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time- the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that THAT was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professor's characteristic delight at not imparting information.

There is no suffering if you don't want anything.

That's a weak definition of narrative. That's saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.

Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book.