The Idiot QUOTES

21 " Whenever I’m 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. Svetlana "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

22 " I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn’t get to decide. At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

23 " The croissant was crisp and soft and flaky at the same time. Just biting it made you feel cared for. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

24 " what does 'functioning normally' mean?" I asked.
"Being able to face the past. Having a normal sex life. Not lying awake all night in fits of anxiety."
"Oh. Are most people able to face the past and have normal sex lives?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I think they are," she said. "Anyway, if anyone is, it should be me. Deep down I have a talent for well-being. I can feel it."
I nodded. I thought she had it, too, a talent for well-being. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

25 " Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I'll have reached you. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

26 " It seemed very remarkable that you could travel halfway around the world and still end up looking at some ducks. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

27 " It’s so rare in the world to meet somebody you connect to. Most people are so awful. In the big picture, bad breath just seems relatively manageable. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

28 " Why was "plain" a euphemism for "ugly," when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that here beauty was one of the most important things about her - something having to do with who she really was. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

29 " What did you bring your host family?'
'Chocolate.'
'Chocolate.' She sighed.
'I'm afraid I'll accidentally eat it all before I get there,' I said, following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn't resist chocolate. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

30 " At the same time, it seemed certain to me that someday I would really want to hear his voice and wouldn't be able to, and I would think back to the time that he had invited me to call him, and it would seem as incomprehensible as an invitation to speak to the dead. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

31 " I felt every level, graphemic, morphological, and semantic, and they all hurt. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

32 " Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. "These wolves seem upset at something," he observed. The next morning the cage was all twisted out of shape and the gray wolf Berserker was missing. Dracula had temporarily inherited its body. Dracula had a totally difference experience at the zoo from that of other people. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

33 " but at the end of class, I still felt slightly annoyed towards Ivan, the way you feel towards someone in real life after they say something mean to you in a dream. Instead of taking the stairs with him as usual, I took the elevator. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

34 " In fact I had no such interest, but I knew it was wrong to do things just because other people did. Other people couldn't be the reason why you did anything. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

35 " [it was not a] circle—just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE. I thought Euclid would have been mad.
“That’s so typical of your attitude,” Svetlana said. “You always think everyone is angry. Try to have some perspective. It’s over two thousand years after his death, he’s in Boston for the first time, they’ve named something after him—why should his first reaction be to get pissed off? "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

36 " ...real intimacy is a place where there are no mistakes, at least not in the sense you feel. You don't just blow everything with one wrong move. A friendship is a space where you're supposted and free to make mistakes. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

37 " What was “Cinderella,” if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping? "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

38 " knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

39 " Svetlana said that I thought of myself as a robot who could act only negatively. She said I had cynical ideas about language. “You think language is an end in itself. You don’t believe it stands for anything. No, it’s not that you don’t believe—it’s that you don’t care. For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system.”

“But it is a self-sufficient system.”

“Do you see what you’re saying? This is how you get yourself involved with the devil incarnate. Ivan sensed this attitude in you. He’s cynical in the same way you are only more so, because of math. It’s like you said: math is a language that started out so abstract, more abstract than words, and then suddenly it turned out to be the most real, the most physical thing there was. With math they built the atomic bomb. Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin. Now there’s this special language that can control everything, and manipulate everything, and if you’re the elite who speaks it—you can control everything.

“Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you’re so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further—and then something went wrong. It couldn’t continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else—into sex, or something else. But for some reason, it didn’t. The experiment didn’t work. But by now you’re so, so far from all the landmarks. You’re just drifting in space. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot

40 " Lighting a match felt exciting and a little bit dangerous, and when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player—like the music was about to start. "

― Elif Batuman , The Idiot