183 Quotes by Elif Batuman

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 according to how quantifiably lovable they were?

For dinner she made a soup called “boy-catching soup” and a cake called “mother-in-law cake.” These two dishes seemed to sum up a whole worldview of entrapment and placation.

That’s a weak definition of narrative. That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.

It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden,” like the golden ratio.

Why was “plain” a euphemism for “ugly,” when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that here beauty was one of the most important things about her – something having to do with who she really was.

The novel form is about the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.

What was “Cinderella,” if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?

I felt every level, graphemic, morphological, and semantic, and they all hurt.

I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years!