Quotes from Elif Batuman

Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else every visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years.

I'm not happy," Rósza said. "Why not?" "I don't know." "Are you worried about school?" "No." "Then why?" "Because I'm alone." I felt a wave of exasperation and despair. Was that what all of life was going to be like - you had to be sad when you didn't have a boyfriend?

Quality of life": as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.

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 loveable they were?

Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people—people they could get rid of.

I thought we should be rewriting the categories and trying to think of a better organization than whichever one we happened to have inherited.

Someone whose only reason for not acting in an antisocial way was that they were scared of getting in trouble with God . . . where did you even start with such a person?

What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

The ferry back to Budapest was full of reveling women in their fifties. Elbows linked, they danced, stomped, sang, and coughed. In the bar, they banged bottles against the counter. The few men in their party were slumped at the tables, heads buried in their arms. Only two were sitting upright, addressing a salami of durable appearance with a pocketknife.

Everyone reacted differently to being spoken to in a language they didn't understand. Katya got quiet and scared. Ivan leaned forward with an amused expression. Grisha narrowed his eyes and nodded in a manner suggesting the dawn of comprehension. Boris, a bearded doctoral student, rifled guiltily through his notes like someone having a nightmare that he was already supposed to speak Russian.

A student asking a question was sitting in an amazing posture: legs crossed at both the knee and the ankle, arms intertwined, elbows on the desk, fingers knit together, like his whole organic being aspired to be a French cruller.

Ralph and I returned the movie, Peter's Friends. I had never seen Ralph hate a movie so much that he had to go out in the middle of the night to return it. We kept walking toward the river.

The bank was a real bonanza, as far as lines and printed materials were concerned. They gave you a free dictionary. The dictionary didn't include "ratatouille" or "Tasmanian devil.

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. When

Later we were at another party in a dorm. Why did all parties sound and smell the same, even though the component people were different? It was as if all the different individuals came together and formed the eternal entity Party Person.

What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths? Historians, that was what kind. They would only be happy when they had translated every miraculous book into a product of its historical moment.

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 a self-improvement project.

ended up having dinner with the Nagys. Everything was covered in sour cream.

We had a guide, if you can call him a guide - a sadist, in the clinical sense. What can you say about a man like that; he searched in life for his foothold and he found this one.

There are strange friendships," Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in Demons. "Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die." A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.

Andrea had brought kifli: crescent-shaped rolls first baked by Hungarians to commemorate the Turks' defeat in Vienna, and later introduced by Marie Antoinette in Paris, where they became known as croissants.

There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover.

I kept looking around the bleachers at the audience, middle-aged people in practical clothes. Every single one of them cared about love, but how much? A lot, or only a little bit? The opera went on for a long time. Eventually the two youngest people onstage got married, so we could all go home.

Sometimes I think there could be two kinds of love. There could be one rare kind that just naturally exists between certain people. Then there's the more common kind that is constructed.