Aubrey

“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, Either/Or

“...adults acted as though trying to go anywhere or achieve anything was a frivolous dream, a luxury, compared to the real work of having kids and making money to pay for the kids. Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as a blasphemy-- as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was is there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“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 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, Either/Or

“In this world, you learn to hold the good days and bad days together in your lungs, and you don’t dare breathe out, for fear that in releasing the bad days, you’ll also lose the good ones. On the walk home, I think, this has been a good day.”
― Marisa Crane, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself