soph ☆

“My mother believed that people harbored essential stances of like or dislike toward others, and betrayed these stances in their words and actions. If you came out looking terrible in a photograph, it was a sign that the person who took it didn’t really like you.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“What does a language retain of the violence it has been used to commit?”
― Mireille Gansel, Translation as Transhumance

“Upon leaving that ignoble lavatory, Hugh gently closed the door after him but like a stupid pet it whined and immediately followed him into the room.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things

“While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for?”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them