Elif Batuman Quotes

“Every morning I called Aeroflot to ask about my suitcase. "Oh, it's you," sighed the clerk. "Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase *resignation of the soul*?”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“Eighteen," he repeated, shaking his head. "When I was your age I was dropping acid and cutting high school. I was working summers in a fish factory in Secaucus. Secaucus, New Jersey." He looked at me disapprovingly, as though I were somehow behind schedule.

"Maybe that's what I'll be doing when I'm your age," I suggested.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“But I had never doubted that, when I got back to school, I would find an email from him, explaining everything. It was not, after all, conceivable that there was no explanation, or that the explanation could come from anyone else, or that it could come in any way other than email, since that was how everything had always happened between us.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“Thinking about Don Quixote, I began to wonder about other possible methods for bringing one’s life closer to one’s favorite books. From Cervantes onward, the method of the novel has typically been imitation: the characters try to resemble the characters in the books they find meaningful. But what if you tried something different—what if you tried study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor? What if, instead of going out into your neighborhood pretending to be the hero of Amadís of Gaul, you instead devoted your life to the mystery of its original author, learned Spanish and Portuguese, tracked down all the scholarly experts, figured out where Gaul is (most scholars think Wales or Brittany)—what if you did it all yourself, instead of inventing a fictional character? What if you wrote a book and it was all true?”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them