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Elif Batuman QUOTES

Elif Batuman QUOTES

1 " You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there. "

― Elif Batuman , The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

2 " Most people, the minute they meet 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.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I'm not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They're always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you're like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it's really limited. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

3 " What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place. "

― Elif Batuman

4 " It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

5 " If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them. "

― Elif Batuman , The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

6 " When you think about all the infinitely many galaxies and combinations of DNA, and against all those odds you meet this person - it's a miracle...'
'Right,' I said. I couldn't imagine viewing Bill's presence on Earth as any kind of a miracle, 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 by how quantifiably lovable they are? "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

7 " I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why. "

― Elif Batuman , Either/Or

8 " I'm going to become whatever I was going to become. "

― Elif Batuman , Either/Or

9 " I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia's alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money. "

― Elif Batuman , The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

10 " What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths? Historians, that was what kind. "

― Elif Batuman , Either/Or

11 " Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear? "

― Elif Batuman , Either/Or

12 " It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? "

― Elif Batuman , Either/Or

13 " I had often flipped through a calendar wondering on which of the 366 days (counting February 29) I would die, but it had never once occurred to me to wonder whether I had already met the first person I would have sex with. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

14 " But you and I are sitting face-to-face. We’re real people. He isn’t operating on the level of a real person. He isn’t a real person to you. If he was a real person, you would have all kinds of opportunities to see the flaws in the situation—or to see that, as far as you’re concerned, he isn’t really there. Instead, because he exists as a series of messages, he’s always there, every time you turn on the computer. I bet you read those messages over and over, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you do. And he’s the ideal companion, because you get to fill in the blanks. Now I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to just think about it for a moment.” He paused. “What if this computer fellow had . . . bad breath? "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

15 " He asked if I had liked the book in English. I wondered whether to lie.
"No," I said. "Maybe I should read it again."
"Uh-huh," Ivan said. "So that's how it works for you?"
"How what works?"
"You read a book and don't like it, and then you read it again? "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

16 " 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. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

17 " 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. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

18 " I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn't understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

19 " I read Ivan's messages over and over, thinking about what they meant. I felt ashamed, but why? Why was it more honorable to reread and interpret a novel like Lost Illusions than to reread and interpret some email from Ivan? Was it because Ivan wasn't as good a writer as Balzac? (But I thought Ivan was a good writer.) Was it because Balzac's novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see? But the fact that the email had been written specifically to me, in response to things I had said, made it literally a conversation, in the way that Balzac's novels—written for a general audience, ultimately in order to turn a profit for the printing industry—were not; and so wasn't what I was doing in a way more authentic, and more human? "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

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

― Elif Batuman