Duru

“It was hard to remember, exactly, what he had sounded like before. What he had been like, precisely. But that was the nature of memory. At university she had done an essay drily titled 'The Principles of Hobbesian Memory and Imagination.' Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“To understand the culture, study the dance.
To understand the dance, study the people.”
― Chuck Davis

“Reading in English was so much easier and more fun, and yet I felt dissatisfied, as if I was failing to capitalize on some advantage I had from "being" Turkish-one that would compensate for the hassle of having a name and appearance that had always required explanation. It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation-maybe even more so than in America. People heard my accent, and saw what I was wearing, and doing, and it didn't make sense, or fit with my ID card.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“At the playground, Evren always wanted me to tell the other children, the boys, that I was from America. It was never something I felt like doing: hunting down strange boys, to tell them about America. Wasn't that what I had earned, by always being different in America: the right to be the same, here?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or