Top 100 Elif Batuman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?”

— Elif Batuman

52. “I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said “you can feel the food.” That was how Owen would end up with students who said “savor,” while I would end up with students who said “papel iss blonk.”

— Elif Batuman

53. “But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.”

— Elif Batuman

54. “I told him my theory. Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources.”

— Elif Batuman

55. “She says she can’t talk,” Svetlana told me. “She’s a botanist her name is Fernanda, so of course her nickname is Fern. It suits her because ferns are so mysterious and sort of elusive and ferns can survive anywhere.”

— Elif Batuman

56. “Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life. I thought that was the point of writing stories: to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood – for how it came about and for what it led to.”

— Elif Batuman

57. “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

58. “One morning, on my way to a lecture on Balzac, it came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasn’t going to say them; rather, he was going to tell us again that Balzac’s Paris was extremely comprehensive. I went instead to the undergraduate library, to the basement where government documents were stored.”

— Elif Batuman

59. “I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years!”

— Elif Batuman

60. “The ferry back to Budapest was full of reveling women in their fifties. Elbows linked, they danced, stomped, sang, and coughed. In the bar, they banged bottles against the counter. The few men in their party were slumped at the tables, heads buried in their arms. Only two were sitting upright, addressing a salami of durable appearance with a pocketknife.”

— Elif Batuman

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Misty frozen rain was whirling around as I left the building and walked back to the shuttle stop. The shuttle was somewhat less overcrowded than usual. I didn’t get a seat but I had enough room to take out my Walkman, and occasionally I could see between people’s heads out the window, and this made me cheerful. It was weird what was enough to make you feel good or bad, even though your basic life circumstances were the same.”

— Elif Batuman

64. “Andrea had brought kifli: crescent-shaped rolls first baked by Hungarians to commemorate the Turks’ defeat in Vienna, and later introduced by Marie Antoinette in Paris, where they became known as croissants.”

— Elif Batuman

65. “Sometimes I think there could be two kinds of love. There could be one rare kind that just naturally exists between people. Then there’s the more common kind that’s constructed.”

— Elif Batuman

66. “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.”

— Elif Batuman

67. “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.”

— Elif Batuman

68. “I kept looking around the bleachers at the audience, middle-aged people in practical clothes. Every single one of them cared about love, but how much? A lot, or only a little bit? The opera went on for a long time. Eventually the two youngest people onstage got married, so we could all go home.”

— Elif Batuman

69. “I began to intuit dimly why people drank when they went dancing, and it occurred to me that maybe the reason preschool had felt the way it had was that one had had to go through the whole thing sober. When.”

— Elif Batuman

70. “The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist.”

— Elif Batuman

71. “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

72. “Spiderwebs attached themselves, like long trails of agglutinative suffixes, onto our arms and faces.”

— Elif Batuman

73. “Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.”

— Elif Batuman

74. “How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing – to follow the right leads.”

— Elif Batuman

75. “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.”

— Elif Batuman

76. “We had a guide, if you can call him a guide – a sadist, in the clinical sense. What can you say about a man like that; he searched in life for his foothold and he found this one.”

— Elif Batuman

77. “What a beautiful girl you are,” he said, with a kind of ache or awe in his voice, that made me think about how someday I would be old or dead or both, and the transience of all things, of the car, the moonlight, the volcanic rock that was eroding and the stars that were shooting by, made the world seem at once more important and less important, until finally the concept of “important” itself faded away like an expiring firework that glittered against the sky.”

— Elif Batuman

78. “Most people, the minute they met 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.”

— Elif Batuman

79. “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 facades glowed pink, and everything blue got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?”

— Elif Batuman

80. “Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.”

— Elif Batuman

81. “A student asking a question was sitting in an amazing posture: legs crossed at both the knee and the ankle, arms intertwined, elbows on the desk, fingers knit together, like his whole organic being aspired to be a French cruller.”

— Elif Batuman

82. “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.”

— Elif Batuman

83. “I’m going to become whatever I was going to become.”

— Elif Batuman

84. “I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.”

— Elif Batuman

85. “It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything – though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.”

— Elif Batuman

86. “Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get – you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.”

— Elif Batuman

87. “For the first time in my life, I couldn’t think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn’t say what you were supposed to do.”

— Elif Batuman

88. “So what do you think about love?′ I asked Mesut in a casual tone. ‘Love is to get caught on something,’ he said readily. ‘It’s to be unable to forget.”

— Elif Batuman

89. “That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities.”

— Elif Batuman

90. “Later we were at another party in a dorm. Why did all parties sound and smell the same, even though the component people were different? It was as if all the different individuals came together and formed the eternal entity Party Person.”

— Elif Batuman

91. “When I woke up in the morning, there was a second or two when I felt light and free, unaware of any reason to feel upset. Then all my knowledge and memories rushed back and a weight descended on my sternum and the creaking started behind my eyes.”

— Elif Batuman

92. “What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths? Historians, that was what kind. They would only be happy when they had translated every miraculous book into a product of its historical moment.”

— Elif Batuman

93. “Wasn’t that how people in other countries viewed all American people – with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift? With the way they were protected – the way I was protected – from so much of the “reality” that happened elsewhere?”

— Elif Batuman

94. “That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professor’s characteristic delight at not imparting information.”

— Elif Batuman

95. “Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so much that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back-promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You’re going to die without it. You’re never going to get it. You’re going to die. Here it is.”

— Elif Batuman

96. “When the time came to sell cookies, my mother, to whom few things could have been more shameful than the idea of my going door-to-door trying to sell anything, sold all the cookies herself, to her own mother. Ten years later, when I was visiting my grandmother in Ankara, I found them in the pantry: thirty unopened boxes of Girl Scout cookies. “Why didn’t you eat your cookies?” I asked. “Oh, they’re cookies? I thought they were candles,” said my grandmother.”

— Elif Batuman

97. “There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored – a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening – that was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.”

— Elif Batuman

98. “There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.”

— Elif Batuman

99. “Quality of life”: as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.”

— Elif Batuman

100. “Now we already lived in different buildings, and soon we would live even farther away from each other, and she would be married, and I would never wait for her in her bedroom again. How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries.”

— Elif Batuman