Quotes from Elif Batuman

Hungarian men are very interesting. They know how to say what you want to hear. They are very clever. But they do not mean these words. Five or six months later, when it is enough, then they will say the really awful things." Those words, "when it is enough," stayed with me for a long time.

What was the relationship between leaving the country and an aesthetic life? What was it about America in particular that seemed to make one's life unaesthetic?

But you aren't really looking!" she exclaimed. "You are—" She flipped through her dictionary. "Wool, gathering!" "That's true," I said. "I am woolgathering." "You are thinking about your friend," she said. "That's why you don't want to listen to me." "But Rózsa. Don't you ever like to . . . to do woolgathering?" "No! I am not a dreamer.

I know that's the cliché about America: 'Oh, it's so impersonal! Oh, I feel like a number!' That's not what I mean. I'm not saying the Hungarian way is better. In general, I think isolation is a good thing. With most people I'm so thankful not to be really close to them. In Hungary they would immediately start to tell you all this shit.

And I had never heard anyone describe so accurately the difference between last year and this year: Last year, I admired wines. This, I'm wandering inside the red world.

You bet. But I'd rather be bitter than frivolous. Okay, my sexual experience might be limited to kissing my cousin's boyfriend in the Belgrade zoo at age thirteen, whereas Sanja is having an affair with a thirty-five-year-old married newscaster. But even so, I think I have a deeper understanding of love than she does.

How could a thirteenth-century person have written such things? If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee. On the other hand, why couldn't Rumi have said that?

What had been revealed to me at this sadomasochism-themed party was the true face of all parties: how they were all, in one way or another, sadomasochism-themed.

Of course, it wasn't possible to account for all the time. By the time you had written down what time it was, it was already later than it had been.

There was another snowstorm, although immediately after, the sun came out and it was almost sixty degrees, so the snow melted. Nothing was real anymore; everything was over.

Svetlana said that when she was in the first grade, kids would torture each other in the playground by asking, "Who do you love more, Comrade Tito or your own mother?

Joining the literary magazine hadn't previously occurred to me. I didn't want to be an editor, or run a magazine, so why would I want to do a fake version of those things in college?

There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to use -mi?, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.

According to the artichoke theory, man had some inner essence, or "heart"; according to the onion theory, once you had unwrapped all the layers of society off of man, there was nothing there. Seen from this perspective, the idea of an onion masquerading as an artichoke seemed sinister, even sociopathic.

In a corner, a girl was staring at a stack of flash cards with incredible ferocity, as if she were going to eat them.

My father says that surviving a war makes you either very bitter or very frivolous.

The man in the seat ahead of me started tossing and turning. His pillow fell into my dessert. The pink whipped foam formed meaningful-looking patterns on the white fabric. I saw a bird—that meant travel.

I wanted to look through the telescope, but felt embarrassed—it felt like looking in someone's medicine cabinet. The medicine cabinet of God. Well, and what would change if I saw some stars?

In the end I signed up for a different Spanish film seminar, taught in Spanish, by an adjunct instructor. The adjunct instructor also said stupid things, but they were in Spanish, so you learned more.

It felt ominous to me - the aestheticized girliness, infatuation and weakness.

I thought about how wonderful it would be to walk around with him until the following morning. I really felt that way, even though he stressed me out so much, and all we ever did was mishear each other and say "What?" all the time.

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 wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.

After a few days, the physical symptoms passed. Inside my soul, I still felt like I had fallen off the end of the conveyor belt, but I was able to ear, read, swim, and hold my face together such that I wasn't constantly staring at people with the stricken eyes of death.

Exactly! Because he's not a real person, you don't have to worry about it. Do you see what I'm saying? He looks like an ideal person, but the real person behind that mask could have all kinds of problems.