Katharine

“In the train station, people were drinking coffee and reading newspapers. I felt glad to see that life was going on—actual life, where people were working and staying awake and trying to accomplish things, which was the point of coffee. There was a poem with that mood by Pasternak: “Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, artist.” It sounded better in Russian, because the word for “artist” had three syllables, it was an amphibrach, like “spaghetti,” or “appendix.” Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, gorilla, I thought as I went down the elevator to the subway platform.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“A student asking a question was sitting in an amazing posture: legs crossed at both the knee and the ankle, arms intertwined, elbows on the desk, fingers knit together, like his whole organic being aspired to be a French cruller.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“I'm twenty-six," she said, as if it were bad news she had received only recently. "It isn't the age I feel like."

"What age do you feel like?"

"Nineteen -- like you."

But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year -- maybe as many as seven years -- to learn to feel nineteen.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot