Chiara

“In the past, my goal in conversation had been to accurately represent the things that I thought, and to deploy these thoughts in relation to the things that other people said, while exercising caution to not betray ignorant or antisocial ideas, and the whole thing had been so much to think about that in the end I usually hadn't said anything at all.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“I recognized that the idea of being penetrated and dominated was exciting to me, too, though the mechanics, as well as the implications, were unclear and troubling. Also, why did we have to be excited by that? Why couldn’t we be excited about something else? But I knew I was being childish and unrealistic, and Svetlana was right. Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“Still, I found the idea of an aesthetic life to be tremendously compelling. It was the first time I had heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have for your life, other than making money and having kids. Nobody ever said that that was their organizing principle, but I had often noticed it, when I was growing up: the way 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.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“He never knows what he wants. It changes completely from minute to minute, and he has no decisive inner voice that says 'This is the real you, this is what you desire.' Ed is blurry, to even himself. His outlines are vague. This is fine except that you need to be solid for other people. To have relationships, to be trusted, you have to say, 'This is me, this is what I want' and act as if that were true at all times.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends