Quotes from Elif Batuman

It was like when Isabel managed not to marry the guy with the cotton mills, and it was her first taste of victory—because "she had done what she preferred.

Ivan pushed his paper cup in various directions, as if it were a king under check. He said that in Hungary people were more honest. If they thought you were doing something stupid, they let you know right away. Americans were polite and remote, as if there were bubbles separating everyone. "You can't tell if someone really likes you," he said. "You can't get close. There are all these blocks." "Blocks," I echoed.

Then I resolved myself and dove under. I felt my skin tighten all over, and realized how infrequently one felt conscious of one's whole body at once, as a continuous surface.

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 the script.

I'm 26," she said, as if it were bad news she had received only recently. "It isn't the age I feel like." "What age do you feel like?" "Nineteen, like you." But to me, 19 still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year, maybe as many as seven years, to learn to feel 19.

At some point I thought I had grown a lump in my thigh, but it turned out to be a tangerine- it had fallen through a hole in the pocket and ended up trapped in the lining.

The existentialists said you couldn't make decisions based on preexisting norms or codes, which were always too general for any given case. Rather, every decision you made created you. The decision (existence) comes first, and creates essence.

Do you think it's going to rain?" I asked. "Yes. Why?" My heart quickened. "I don't know," I said. Then I realized I wanted it to rain because maybe Ivan and his family would come back to Budapest a day early and Ivan might call me. I knew there were a lot of flaws in this reasoning. But my body didn't know.

A whole ocean of rain seemed to be pouring out of the sky. We sat under an awning near a hotel parking lot and ate yellow plums. Eventually Rózsa ate one of the cookies I had bought, and I felt happy and proud, like I had successfully fed a shy and proud animal. Within minutes the sun was blazing as if it didn't remember a thing.

Everything was at once overwhelmingly the same and ever so slightly different.

The Eastern Question, too, was something I had heard of: like "the Woman Question," it turned up in nineteenth-century novels. The Eastern Question was essentially, "How do we divide up all the Ottomans' stuff?" It wasn't so different from the Woman Question, which was about whether women could have jobs and money. The things some people considered a "question." If you read stuff like that all your life, it would make you hate Russia.

Juli's mother, a beautician, was very thin, with unusually bright eyes. 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.

What was it to know each other?

They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me that I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad Are Friends: it wasn't a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know

It seems to me that your sense of other people's awfulness might be compensating for your own sense of inferiority and fear of rejection. You rationalize the rejection of your peers by telling yourself it comes from other people's deficiencies rather than your own. They can't understand your philosophy or your ideas.

And rightly. Isn't there something to be researched, in every corner of God's creation? Isn't that what you've found, miss, in your travels?

The Other," I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism. "That's

Essays can be such a pain! Basically, the reader isn't on your side, so you can't leave out any of the logical steps. And sometimes when a connection is delicate, the steps take too long to spell out–it just isn't possible, by the time you get to the end of the steps, the mood is lost.

It's so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious. I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you've swallowed the universe? Not say so?

Yes: understanding the point of sex felt just like understanding the point of Shakespeare. And weren't the two related?

Senin için, benim için ol­duÄŸundan daha zormuÅŸ gibi geldi hep." "Neden benim için daha zor olsun?" "Çünkü sen yaln?zs?n.

Why did I insist on blocking myself against the marrow of life? Wasn't this—this, being outside, here, negotiating with a handsome, possibly disabled mugger—wasn't this, the cigarette butts and melon guts in the gutter, the faint smell of horses, the sickening pulse of bass from the clubs—wasn't this what life was?

How could I miss him? I didn't even know him.

I felt dissatisfied, as if I was failing to capitalize on some advantage I had from "being" Turkish—one that would compensate for the hassle of having a name and appearance that had always required explanation. It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation