Quotes from Elif Batuman

You're always sad when you leave Rome," he said at some point. "You're always depressed until you go back.

You have a lot of time, you don't need to be in a hurry." That's what the deans said, when you tried to take five classes. Easy for them: they were already deans. Either that was something they wanted to be doing, in which case they could afford to relax; or it wasn't what they had wanted to be doing, and now they were invested in preventing anyone else from accomplishing anything, either.

Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes— so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside of the script.

On Friday, I stood in front of the class singing "Hello, Goodbye" by the Beatles. It was like falling off a cliff: time stretched, there was so much time to think different thoughts. "You say yes, I say no," I sang. "You say stop, and I say go, go, go.

I was overcome by a sense of how much more there was in his life than in mine, by the things to do and distances to travel, while I never had done anything or gone anywhere, and never would.

Lines like, "The Fishery serves up huge portions of fresh but mediocre fish to a family-oriented clientele," impressed me with their judicious apportionment of strengths and weaknesses, as did the writers' easy conversance with social types I had never heard of ("chatty alterna-folk," "relaxed Gen-X waitrons").

By a similar operation, the write-up of Wholesome Fresh moved me almost to tears. Supposedly open 24 hours, Wholesome Fresh offers pretty much everything your heart desires. Hearty sandwiches. Hot dishes. Sushi. Chocolate Sauce. Paprika. Napkins. There it was, finally on display: the gap between the idea that Wholesome Fresh promulgated about itself, in a naïve or sinister way, and what it felt like to actually be there. What a relief to see it articulated!

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?

though he could certainly be witty, he wasn't what you would really call funny, not like Dickens was.

In my heart I didn't see the need for a backpack. Wouldn't I be better off with a suitcase? Especially now that suitcases all had wheels. People never even talked about that anymore, and acted as if it had always been that way. Yet, all through my childhood, everyone had been yelling, "You'll hurt your back!" and wrenching suitcases out of each other's hands, in an effort to personally be the one who hurt their back.

Père Goriot's previous owner, Brian Kennedy, had systematically underlined what seemed to be the most meaningless and disconnected sentences in the whole book. Thank God I wasn't in love with Brian Kennedy, and didn't feel any mania to decipher his thoughts.

When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn't take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn't learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.

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. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.

Please don't leave me all alone." Was that what I, too was afraid of? And maybe not just me, but everyone?

In the morning when I saw Ivan's name in the in-box I almost started to cry. It reminded me of a kind of torture I had read about where afterward the captors returned your senses to you one by one, and you felt so grateful that you told them everything.

Trying to explain all the steps was boring and exhausting. I kept imagining Ivan getting bored, or not believing me, and it kept sounding like I was putting the blame on other people, like Svetlana and her mom. When I tried to put the blame on myself, it was also tedious and boring, and in the end I gave up trying to explain anything.

Already we were competing 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.

what was "Cinderella," if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?—

Why do you look like that? You should be happy. A lot of things can happen in an airplane, at night, thirty thousand feet above the ocean.

Just think," he said. "What would your mother say?" Tears welled to my eyes. My mother would be sorry for me.

linguist called Alla who advised us, among other things, to treat our more stupid students with sympathy, "as if they had cancer." While

Is something the matter?" asked Hannah. "You're not your usual cheerful self." "I'm feeling kind of down," I said. "Did something happen?" "I like someone who doesn't like me," I said. I had thought of it as an approximation, but once I said it, it felt like the truth. •

It was terrible to think that he was in this city, possibly very nearby, but I couldn't see him or talk to him because he didn't love me. I couldn't be with him for one minute, not even for the weird leftover hours that nobody else wanted, like from one to three a.m. on a Wednesday.

Anyway, how could therapy even work on me, when I was so far from sharing Svetlana's therapist-like belief that people should be healthy and well-adjusted, that they should go to bed at the same time every night, even if they were reading or having an interesting conversation, or that it was great and life-affirming to go hiking with some guy, or to get married? Of course therapy worked for someone who believed those things.