ashley

“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, Either/Or

“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, Either/Or

“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, Either/Or

“I was overcome by the sense of how much more there was in his life than in mine, by the things to do and distances to travel, while I never had done anything or gone anywhere, and never would.

All I had ever done was visit my parents all the time - first one parent and then the other, with no sign of it ever stopping. Worse yet, I had no one to blame but myself. If my mother told me not to do something, I didn't do it. Everyone's mother told them not to do things, but I was the only one who listened.

The eternal pauper in the great marketplace of ideas and of the world, I had nothing to teach anyone. I didn't have anything anyone wanted.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot