Either Or Elif Batuman Quotes

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

I'm going to become whatever I was going to become.

I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.

There was something abstract and gentle about the experience of being ignored—a feeling of being spared, a known impossibility of anything happening—that was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

When I woke up in the morning, there was a second or two when I felt light and free, unaware of any reason to feel upset. Then all my knowledge and memories rushed back and a weight descended on my sternum and the creaking started behind my eyes.

I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable.

That had been the worst part of childhood: people telling you how lucky you were to live in a carefree time with no responsibilities

How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.

Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professor's characteristic delight at not imparting information.

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.

Someone whose only reason for not acting in an antisocial way was that they were scared of getting in trouble with God . . . where did you even start with such a person?

I learned a lot from that, like how much it hurt to see how other people described you, and how things that you said about another person, especially your parents, seemed neutral when addressed to a third party, but lethal when you thought about your parents reading it.

All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.

So what do you think about love?' I asked Mesut in a casual tone. 'Love is to get caught on something,' he said readily. 'It's to be unable to forget.

Quality of life": as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.

What kind of cretins cared more about hammering out a string of inheritance than about discovering universal truths? Historians, that was what kind. They would only be happy when they had translated every miraculous book into a product of its historical moment.

Later we were at another party in a dorm. Why did all parties sound and smell the same, even though the component people were different? It was as if all the different individuals came together and formed the eternal entity Party Person.

Anyway, I didn’t want to be “nurtured” in an “environment” that was set up for me to “excel.” I wanted to do whatever was the most real and rigorous.

Of course, an ending was always sad, but to not end something that needed to end was even more sad.

There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.

(What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so much that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back-promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You’re going to die without it. You’re never going to get it. You’re going to die. Here it is.

It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick facades glowed pink, and everything blue got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

I thought we should be rewriting the categories and trying to think of a better organization than whichever one we happened to have inherited.

Fiona Apple's album made me more immediately depressed than any other music I remembered hearing.

Without meaning to, I looked into his eyes. What I saw, it was beyond my pay grade. I went out to get a taxi.

Please don't leave me all alone." Was that what I, too was afraid of? And maybe not just me, but everyone?

If any poet tried to enter my personality like a vacant building...!

Near the beginning of “The Portrait of a Lady,” there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write “Madame Bovary.” But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there's no closure, it doesn't stop, and it's this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read,” wrote Hélène Cixous, in a sentence that could definitely have been shorter.

Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes— so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside of the script.

What a beautiful girl you are,” he said, with a kind of ache or awe in his voice, that made me think about how someday I would be old or dead or both, and the transience of all things, of the car, the moonlight, the volcanic rock that was eroding and the stars that were shooting by, made the world seem at once more important and less important, until finally the concept of “important” itself faded away like an expiring firework that glittered against the sky.

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.

For some reason, the image that came to my mind was of Peter explaining to someone in a quiet, serious voice that Selin's problems had been more serious than anyone had realized. No way, I thought. I was going to stick around and bury those people.

Wasn’t that how people in other countries viewed all American people—with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive stick shift? With the way they were protected—the way I was protected—from so much of the “reality” that happened elsewhere?

It was a strange thing how people acted as if having a kid was the best thing that could happen to anyone, even though actual parents seemed to experience most of their children's actual childhoods as an annoyance, which they compensated for by bossing them around. People with kids had to go to work every day, at boring, reliable jobs. On the plus side, work was an acceptable way to escape your children, without seeming to want to. The children, having no such escape, lived through long stretches of boredom and powerlessness, punctuated by occasional treats that they overvalued and freaked out over because the rest of their lives were so empty.

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.

Previously, I had believed that the sadness came first, and tears were a result, but the reality was clearly more complicated, because once the tears didn’t come, the sadness somehow bottomed out, became shallower. What if the way Zoloft worked was just by dehydrating you?

...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. Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as a blasphemy-- as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was is there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.

Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you'll never get--you will get it someday." I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. "Yes, you will get get it," she said, looking right at me, "but by that time, you won't want it anymore. That's how it happens.

Of course, you couldn’t have a party without alcohol; I understood this now. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn’t there any way around that? Juho was talking about different research into alcoholism that people were doing in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue of how to make people less intolerable? “It might be a case of having to reduce a big problem we can’t solve to a smaller problem that we can solve,” Juho said.

Now we already lived in different buildings, and soon we would live even farther away from each other, and she would be married, and I would never wait for her in her bedroom again. How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries.

I felt dissatisfied, as if I was failing to capitalize on some advantage I had from “being” Turkish—one that would compensate for the hassle of having a name and appearance that had always required explanation. It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation

It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything—though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.

What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn't a crush, but love. "A crush is about build- ing up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you're secure with, to give to the other person." I silently absorbed the implication that what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn't have a self I was secure with.

The Other,” I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism. “That’s

What had been revealed to me at this sadomasochism-themed party was the true face of all parties: how they were all, in one way or another, sadomasochism-themed.

My father says that surviving a war makes you either very bitter or very frivolous.

The world looked particularly crisp and etched-out in the sunlight.

Wasn’t Pushkin’s love, and the love of everyone who read Eugene Onegin, more important than Onegin acting like a loser?

Last spring, months before we had to declare our majors, Svetlana had started soliciting advice from her parents and other old people.

Another saying, “The egg didn’t like its shell,” was used for people who tried to distance themselves from where they came from, or who disrespected their parents.

And rightly. Isn’t there something to be researched, in every corner of God’s creation? Isn’t that what you’ve found, miss, in your travels?

Yes: understanding the point of sex felt just like understanding the point of Shakespeare. And weren’t the two related?

Weeping, a powerful physical process that was normally out of the question, became a constant possibility.

Was there a version of “The Seducer’s Diary” where they were equal—where he wasn’t tricking her into doing something she didn’t want? Or was that what seduction was?

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

And yet, the second time had blocked out the first time, and I didn’t like to think that it hadn’t been the first time.

Riley made me a tape of her Fiona Apple album.

It was like when Isabel managed not to marry the guy with the cotton mills, and it was her first taste of victory—because “she had done what she preferred.

And I had never heard anyone describe so accurately the difference between last year and this year: Last year, I admired wines. This, I’m wandering inside the red world.

Obviously all the girls, whether they talked about it or not, were on the lookout for any reprieve from the hassle of not having a boyfriend: the way it exposed you to censure and nosiness.

It couldn’t have been depressing, because my mother had worked so hard to make it not be depressing. And yet—was it possible that how hard my mother worked was part of why it had been depressing?

The hours I had spent like that, making my fingers simper at each other. I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

The implication of “good riddance”—that love would switch off, like an electric light, once you realized the object of your love was dumb, or cowardly, or had bad taste—was not strictly borne out by observation.

My mother said that that had been wrong. She said that children were people, whose dignity and privacy were worthy of respect. She was the only person I had ever met or heard of who thought or said anything like that.

Back in Cambridge, the bank clock read 8:40. We went to Ivan’s dining hall. The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered.

but even with Varenka, Koznyshev almost proposed to her when they were picking mushrooms. Koznyshev had therefore at least contemplated having sex with Varenka. There were no women in that book with whom nobody thought about having sex.

He left before she woke up—because of how disgusted he was by women’s tears and prayers, “which change everything yet are really of no consequence.” I thought about that a lot: about what she could have said that would have been of consequence.

Malin opened the glass sliding door and the dog sailed out over the dunes and started doing everything at once: peeing and frolicking and scrabbling in the sand. There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.

Why was it considered laudable, sociable, and funny to do this thing that made a person feel like they were dying, and did on occasion induce death? Of course, you couldn't have a party without alcohol. I understood this. I understood the reason. The reason was that people were intolerable. But wasn't there any way around that? Juho was talking about different research that people were doing into alcoholism in Finland. Why was nobody researching the more direct issue, of trying to make people less intolerable?

That whole time, all of high school and also middle school, was something I didn’t like to think about. It had been like prison. I knew it was wrong to compare my experience at a prep school in New Jersey to that of a disadvantaged person in an actual prison. Still, I compared it. Enforced idleness, arbitrary punishment, being trapped for hours among people crazed by hormones and boredom. . . . Some rewards went to the domineering, others to the servile. You couldn’t not be in an unhealthy relationship to power.

But, for some reason, the laws of their universe didn’t allow them to openly oppose you. All they would do was smile fixedly and try to tell you not to take so many classes and, if you smiled fixedly back for long enough, they would eventually sign the petition.

They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored. My parents told me that I was expecting too much from Frog and Toad Are Friends: it wasn’t a novel. In that way, I understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know,

One must always be thinking,” Isabel told Ralph. “I am not sure it’s not a greater happiness to be powerless.” And Ralph replied: “For weak people I have no doubt it’s a greater happiness.’’ It was a confirmation of my own idea of strength—of my determination to be strong.

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.

It wasn’t until high school, when I took my first creative writing class, that I began to sense trouble. I realized, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these weren’t the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire. I already had my hands full writing about the people I actually knew, and all the things they said. That was what I needed writing for. Now I had to invent extra people and think of things for them to say?

I sometimes went with Svetlana to Pilates—even though the logistics of mat placement was deeply stressful, in a way that made me feel like I understood the primal conflicts for land that formed the basis of modern history. The room had a maximum occupancy of thirty, which might have been OK if everyone was just sitting there, but not if the idea was to make your body as long as possible and do sweeping motions with your limbs. Svetlana always made us get there early, to secure an advantageous position. Then the people who came later would try to crowd us out, inserting themselves between us, or directly in front of us, blocking our view—not apologetically, but with a self-righteous attitude. If you didn’t defend your space like Svetlana did, sitting up extra straight and doing elaborate stretches, you got hemmed in and couldn’t do the movements. People kept hitting you (or were you hitting them?) and giving you dirty looks.

Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes—so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

But I had never doubted that, when I got back to school, I would find an email from him, explaining everything. It was not, after all, conceivable that there was no explanation, or that the explanation could come from anyone else, or that it could come in any way other than email, since that was how everything had always happened between us.

I thought there was something wrong with the way departments and majors were organized. Why were the different branches of literature categorized by geography and language, while sciences were categorized by the level of abstraction, or by the size of the object of study ? Why wasn't literature classified by word count ? Why wasn't science classified by country ? Why did religion have its own department, instead of going into philosophy or anthropology ? What made something a religion and not a philosophy ? Why was the history of non-industrial people in anthropology, and not in history ? Why were the most important subjects addressed only indirectly ? Why was there no department of love ?

On the plus side, Matt was good-natured and didn’t have a self-esteem problem, so you didn’t have to deal with him blaming you for making him feel stupid. On the other hand, the minute you tried to talk about anything interesting, he would swiftly, good-naturedly, inexorably change the subject back to one of the three kinds of things he ever talked about.

How confident the other people in the class seemed to be in the rights that had been conferred on them by being there first—which was really only a matter of luck, because their aunts hadn’t happened to call just then. Where, exactly, did they want me to go? Did they want me to just not exist? Was that how the Israelis and Palestinians felt about each other?

Lakshmi had assured me, when I pointed it out, that the insufferability of clubs was widely acknowledged. Why else did I think everyone was on drugs the whole time? My reluctance to talk to the guy you had to talk to to get the drugs was exceeded only by my mistrust of the drugs themselves. If I messed up my brain, what else did I have? Why wasn’t Lakshmi scared?

I had thought that an aesthetic life would be more like a string of adventures than like a coming-of-age novel, or the life-cycle of a frog, where there was a grand progression ending with 'maturity' and the ability to procreate. But it was impossible to imagine an aesthetic life, or any life, without falling in love. Without love, knowledge itself became a hassle; became bullying and imposition. 'My country.' 'Learn about my country.' Being in love was the only thing that made you want to learn about a person's country, or about anything else outside your experience. Falling in love was the essential feature of a novel. The Russian word for 'novel,' roman, could also mean 'love affair.' A 'love affair' implied sex, at least the question of sex.

Anyway, how could therapy even work on me, when I was so far from sharing Svetlana’s therapist-like belief that people should be healthy and well-adjusted, that they should go to bed at the same time every night, even if they were reading or having an interesting conversation, or that it was great and life-affirming to go hiking with some guy, or to get married? Of course therapy worked for someone who believed those things.

The Eastern Question, too, was something I had heard of: like “the Woman Question,” it turned up in nineteenth-century novels. The Eastern Question was essentially, “How do we divide up all the Ottomans’ stuff?” It wasn’t so different from the Woman Question, which was about whether women could have jobs and money. The things some people considered a “question.” If you read stuff like that all your life, it would make you hate Russia.

There was something about crying so much, the way it made my body so limp and hot and shuddering, that made me feel closer to sex. Maybe there was a line where sex and total sadness touched--one of those surprising borders that turned out to exist, like the one between Italy and Slovenia. Music, too, was adjacent. It was like Trieste, which was Italian and Slovenia and also somehow Austrian. Music was the thing that made it the most clear what sex would be like. The feeling of different places being touched and resonating at the same time. Like sitting on a parapet with your eyes closed, feeling sunlight on your left eyelid and a breeze on your right forearm. Music was the only other thing that was layered like that, so that each new component changed the meaning of the whole. And so much building up and holding back-- promising and withholding, and withholding, and withholding. You're going to die without it. YOu're never going to get it. You're going to die. Here it is.

Lakshmi said that, according to French feminist theory, you couldn’t ignore the men, because their views on women were baked into culture at such a deep level. Just by using words, you were perpetuating their ideas, because they were the ones who had made up language. “So what are you supposed to do? Not use words?” “Well, they say that women have to make up their own language, and their own kind of writing, outside of the patriarchal hegemony.” I stared at her. “You’re joking.” “No, not at all. It’s called écriture féminine.

In relation to “Killing Me Softly,” I was surely a poseur, the kind of coward to whom crossover albums were marketed or, worse yet, someone co-opting someone else’s bad experience. And yet, now, in the Tower Records, I understood that there was a sense in which “Killing Me Softly” was just a song—it itself wasn’t the cursive font in which the titles were printed, which made me think of a tattoo, and caused me to feel sheltered and useless. I ended up buying the cassette single, because it was only two dollars, and because it seemed more honest about just being into the most popular song on the album.

The essential qualities of radio music were: a tone of oracular truth; an appeal to “you”; an uncertainty as to whether you yourself were “you.” Radio music was summed up by the woman with the sexless, sphinxlike voice who had traveled the world and the seven seas, and had found that everybody was looking for something. “Some of them want to use you; some of them want to be used by you”: I recognized this to be absolutely true, without qualification—either despite, or because of, how it contradicted the logic of self-interest, in a way that would be revealed by adult life, and would be in some way its defining feature.

I couldn’t believe how relevant and applicable The Portrait of a Lady was to my life—way more so than Against Nature. The main character, Isabel, was my age, American, and lively. Only some people thought she was beautiful. The work of art she was creating was her own character: how she acted, how she was, how other people saw her. From this perspective, the aesthetic wasn’t really the opposite of the ethical. The way Isabel wanted to be, and act, and seem, was generous and brave. Her main goal was to avoid meanness, jealousy, and cruelty—not because God said they weren’t permitted, but because who even wanted to be like that?

In the end, I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of. That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I’d been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about. It was a great disappointment to find that, even at Harvard, most people’s plan was to have children and amass money for them. You would be talking to someone who seemed like they viewed the world as a place of free movement and the exchange of ideas, and then it would turn out they were in a huge hurry to get everything interesting over with while they were young.

Near the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

I hadn’t expected Ivan to write back. It felt magical, like hearing from a dead person. I almost started to cry. Then I did “finger” and saw that Ivan was actually logged on to the Harvard network. He was physically here. Such relief—like some vital element had been restored to the atmosphere. He was finally here again, like last year, and he must have been planning to see me; that was why there had been hope and futurity in his tone. I wondered if I should write back to him, but I decided to wait for him to call, as I was sure that he would. — With the passage of time, this expectation came to strike me as insane. Of course he wasn’t going to call. If he had hoped to see me, he would have told me he was coming. He was here to visit his girlfriend, to have sex with his girlfriend, to do any number of things and to see any number of people, but not me. I was literally the one person he would be least likely to want to see, out of everyone on the planet, including all the people he had never met.