Top 100 Elif Batuman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

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

— Elif Batuman

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

— Elif Batuman

6. “I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.”

— Elif Batuman

7. “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

8. “When you’re reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?”

— Elif Batuman

9. “For a moment it felt like we weren’t in the Danube at all but in the river of time, and everyone was at a different point, though in another sense we were all here at once.”

— Elif Batuman

10. “Love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. 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

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

— Elif Batuman

12. “As usual, the girls were more interesting to look at.”

— Elif Batuman

13. “There was a poem with that mood by Pasternak: “Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, artist.” It sounded better in Russian, because the word for “artist” had three syllables, it was an amphibrach, like “spaghetti,” or “appendix.” Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, gorilla, I thought as I went down the elevator to the subway platform.”

— Elif Batuman

14. “There are strange friendships,” Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in Demons. “Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die.” A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.”

— Elif Batuman

15. “It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What’s the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.”

— Elif Batuman

16. “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

17. “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 according to how quantifiably lovable they were?”

— Elif Batuman

18. “Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love.”

— Elif Batuman

19. “I didn’t care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years – it took the experience of lived time – to realize that they really are the same thing.”

— Elif Batuman

20. “The eternal pauper in the great marketplace of ideas and of the world, I had nothing to teach anyone. I didn’t have anything anyone wanted.”

— Elif Batuman

21. “It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden,” like the golden ratio.”

— Elif Batuman

22. “Your atom, I think it will never go back to peace, to cereal or rocks or anything like that. Once it has been seduced there is no way back, the way is always ahead, and it is so much harder after the passage from innocence. But it does not work to pretend to be innocent anymore. That seduced atom has energies that seduce people, and those rarely get lost.”

— Elif Batuman

23. “I felt a great need to tell him how I was surrounded, overwhelmed, by things of unknown or dubious meaning, things that weren’t commensurate to me in any way.”

— Elif Batuman

24. “I wanted to know how it was going to turn out, like flipping ahead in a book. I didn’t even know what kind of story it was, or what kind of role I was supposed to be playing. Which of us was taking it more seriously? Didn’t that have to be me, because I was younger, and also because I was the girl? One the other hand, I thought that there was a way in which I was lighter than he was – that there was a serious heaviness about him that was foreign to me, and that I rejected.”

— Elif Batuman

25. “I felt every level, graphemic, morphological, and semantic, and they all hurt.”

— Elif Batuman

26. “Europe was so small. It seemed weird that people took it so seriously.”

— Elif Batuman

27. “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.”

— Elif Batuman

28. “I kept 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.”

— Elif Batuman

29. “Moreover, my policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.”

— Elif Batuman

30. “Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.”

— Elif Batuman

31. “Already we were comparing 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.”

— Elif Batuman

32. “On the train back, Svetlana told me about a Serbian movie director who had been friends with her father in Belgrade. The director’s wife, an actress, had gone to Paris to make a movie with a young French director. The French director had died tragically, by falling off a bar-stool. “They say it might have been suicide,” Svetlana said.”

— Elif Batuman

33. “When you invent something, you’re drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It’s only when you’re faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.”

— Elif Batuman

34. “The novel form is about the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.”

— Elif Batuman

35. “There is no suffering if you don’t want anything.”

— Elif Batuman

36. “Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else every visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years.”

— Elif Batuman

37. “Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.”

— Elif Batuman

38. “That’s a weak definition of narrative. That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.”

— Elif Batuman

39. “I felt a wave of nausea to realize that I had propagated these stories just by telling Svetlana what was going on – just because I had wanted to tell some other person the basic events of my own life.”

— Elif Batuman

40. “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

41. “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

42. “I had a slab of German chocolate cake the size of a child’s tombstone. Ralph.”

— Elif Batuman

43. “An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.”

— Elif Batuman

44. “It was weird what was enough to make you feel good or bad, even though your basic life circumstances were the same.”

— Elif Batuman

45. “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

46. “I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.”

— Elif Batuman

47. “In the rearview mirror I saw Ivan half running behind the car, and I felt despair and envy. Of course he couldn’t love me, not when I lived through so many layers, when I was spooked by Montmartre, and wore a seat belt in order to steer a car out of a ditch.”

— Elif Batuman

48. “Everyone reacted differently to being spoken to in a language they didn’t understand. Katya got quiet and scared. Ivan leaned forward with an amused expression. Grisha narrowed his eyes and nodded in a manner suggesting the dawn of comprehension. Boris, a bearded doctoral student, rifled guiltily through his notes like someone having a nightmare that he was already supposed to speak Russian.”

— Elif Batuman

49. “The bank was a real bonanza, as far as lines and printed materials were concerned. They gave you a free dictionary. The dictionary didn’t include “ratatouille” or “Tasmanian devil.”

— Elif Batuman

50. “It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea.”

— Elif Batuman