Elif Batuman Quotes

I didn't care about truth, I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

~ Elif Batuman

You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.

~ Elif Batuman

Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I'm not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They're always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you're like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it's really limited.

~ Elif Batuman

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.

~ Elif Batuman

It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that 19th century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.

~ Elif Batuman

If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

~ Elif Batuman

When you think about all the infinitely many galaxies and combinations of DNA, and against all those odds you meet this person - it's a miracle...' 'Right,' I said. I couldn't imagine viewing Bill's presence on Earth as any kind of a miracle, but wasn't that itself the miracle - that love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up by how quantifiably lovable they are?

~ Elif Batuman