Quotes from Elif Batuman

Without meaning to, I looked into his eyes. What I saw, it was beyond my pay grade. I went out to get a taxi.

I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

At the first such gathering, I politely sat with them for half an hour, drank some vodka, and even recited a toast about how great it was that Gulya had such great friends. This proved to be a tactical error, since afterward Gulya wanted me to drink vodka and recite toasts with them every night, which was not compatible with my program of study of the great Uzbek language.

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 get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

On the train back, Svetlana told me about a Serbian movie director who had been friends with her father in Belgrade. The director's wife, an actress, had gone to Paris to make a movie with a young French director. The French director had died tragically, by falling off a bar-stool. "They say it might have been suicide," Svetlana said.

Your hair looks different," Grisha told Varvara. "Oh? I haven't had it cut." He squinted at her. "I think it grew

The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn't name didn't exist.

like his whole organic being aspired to be a French cruller.

Whenever I am worried about anything," said this guy Ben,"I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important." I acknowledged that this was a great comfort.

One morning, on my way to a lecture on Balzac, it came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasn't going to say them; rather, he was going to tell us again that Balzac's Paris was extremely comprehensive. I went instead to the undergraduate library, to the basement where government documents were stored.

Spiderwebs attached themselves, like long trails of agglutinative suffixes, onto our arms and faces.

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

As usual, the girls were more interesting to look at.

neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.

She says she can't talk," Svetlana told me. "She's a botanist her name is Fernanda, so of course her nickname is Fern. It suits her because ferns are so mysterious and sort of elusive and ferns can survive anywhere.

When the time came to sell cookies, my mother, to whom few things could have been more shameful than the idea of my going door-to-door trying to sell anything, sold all the cookies herself, to her own mother. Ten years later, when I was visiting my grandmother in Ankara, I found them in the pantry: thirty unopened boxes of Girl Scout cookies. "Why didn't you eat your cookies?" I asked. "Oh, they're cookies? I thought they were candles," said my grandmother.

Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn't a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity.

For the first time in my life, I couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn't say what you were supposed to do.

I never thought to differentiate between you and the person who writes your letters. But I think I see your point. I send you an email: how do you know who wrote it? It could be anyone. There's no way for me to convince you. I say, "It's me!"; you say: "Who's 'me'?" Wouldn't it be amazing if it turned out that we both had ghostwriters? Just imagine them taking a long walk together, walking and walking, and talking only if something came up...

I felt a great need to tell him how I was surrounded, overwhelmed, by things of unknown or dubious meaning, things that weren't commensurate to me in any way.

What a beautiful girl you are," he said, with a kind of ache or awe in his voice, that made me think about how someday I would be old or dead or both, and the transience of all things, of the car, the moonlight, the volcanic rock that was eroding and the stars that were shooting by, made the world seem at once more important and less important, until finally the concept of "important" itself faded away like an expiring firework that glittered against the sky.

Previously, I had believed that the sadness came first, and tears were a result, but the reality was clearly more complicated, because once the tears didn't come, the sadness somehow bottomed out, became shallower. What if the way Zoloft worked was just by dehydrating you?

The anecdote appears in Théophile Gautier's 1859 biography of Balzac. I wondered if it could be shown that Babel had read Gautier. Then I wondered whether there was anything to eat at home. There wasn't. I got in my car and was driving down El Camino Real when my cell phone started ringing.

Definitely there are times when I'm tired and don't want to give up my seat on the bus to an old person. But I get depressed, not angry—like about how I'll be an old woman someday, and even more tired than I am now. I never think I deserve the seat more because I am reading a book." Worried this might sound self-righteous, I added, "Maybe it's just because I dont' read on the bus, it makes me carsick.