Matt Wright

“Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I'll have reached you.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“Svetlana said that she identified with that Madonna more than with any other woman in any other painting. She kept asking me what painting I identified with. I didn't identify with anyone in any paintings.

I finally identified with a painting in the Picasso Museum. Titled Le Buffet de Vauvenargues, it showed a gigantic black sideboard [...]

Svetlana said I had to take a more proactive view of my personhood. She said it wasn't okay to identify with furniture. Indeed, Sartre had illustrated "bad faith" using the analogy of thinking of oneself as a chair -- quite specifically, a chair. Objective claims could be made about a chair, but not about a person, because a person was in constant flux. I said the buffet was also in flux.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot