183 Quotes by Elif Batuman

One morning, on my way to a lecture on Balzac, it came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasn’t going to say them; rather, he was going to tell us again that Balzac’s Paris was extremely comprehensive. I went instead to the undergraduate library, to the basement where government documents were stored.

Spiderwebs attached themselves, like long trails of agglutinative suffixes, onto our arms and faces.

You bet. But I’d rather be bitter than frivolous. Okay, my sexual experience might be limited to kissing my cousin’s boyfriend in the Belgrade zoo at age thirteen, whereas Sanja is having an affair with a thirty-five-year-old married newscaster. But even so, I think I have a deeper understanding of love than she does.

It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea.

The ferry back to Budapest was full of reveling women in their fifties. Elbows linked, they danced, stomped, sang, and coughed. In the bar, they banged bottles against the counter. The few men in their party were slumped at the tables, heads buried in their arms. Only two were sitting upright, addressing a salami of durable appearance with a pocketknife.

But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.

An amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket.

Sometimes I think there could be two kinds of love. There could be one rare kind that just naturally exists between people. Then there’s the more common kind that’s constructed.

I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.