“I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion for medieval people. It… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey's top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
“I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.” — Elif Batuman Copy Share
You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination. — Elif Batuman Copy Share
Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer. — Elif Batuman Copy Share
“Svetlana said that she identified with that Madonna more than with any other woman in any other painting. She kept asking me what painting… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
“Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. "These wolves seem upset at something," he observed. The next morning the cage was all… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
I like to think that I know a lot of words, but I definitely don't know all of them. — Elif Batuman Copy Share
“I don't know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time. — Elif Batuman Copy Share
“Each work of criticism is supposed to build on the body of work, to increase the total sum of human understanding. It's not like… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
I felt grateful to Ataturk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren't held back by superstition or religion, that they were… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
“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… — Elif Batuman Copy Share
