#elif batuman

finalgirlfall:

Why was it fun for us to make each other suffer? Did that mean it wasn’t love? Surely that wasn’t what love was?

—The Idiot, Elif Batuman

finalgirlfall:

The feeling of having betrayed someone was just as bad as the feeling of being betrayed. It was worse.

—The Idiot, Elif Batuman

finalgirlfall:

“You’ve got it really bad,” Bill informed me. “Your whole expression changes when you look at him. You look scared to death.”

—The Idiot, Elif Batuman

finalgirlfall:

I felt dizzy from the sense of intimacy and remoteness. Everything he said came from so thoroughly outside myself. I wouldn’t have been able to invent or guess any of it. He had told me a dream. He had typed: I know you will cheat on me. He said he would forgive me, twice. I hadn’t done anything against him, but the thought that I had, or would, was somehow exciting. I wanted to write back right away, but he had waited a whole day, so I knew I had to wait at least that long.

—The Idiot, Elif Batuman

quotespile:

“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, The Idiot

finalgirlfall:

“Ivan wanted to try an experiment, a game. It would never have worked with someone different, on someone like me. But you, you’re so disconnected from truth, you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language. Naturally, it made him want to see how far he could go. You went further and further—and then something went wrong. It couldn’t continue in the same way. It had to develop into something else—into sex, or something else. But for some reason, it didn’t. The experiment didn’t work. But by now you’re so, so far from all the landmarks. You’re just drifting in space.”

—The Idiot, Elif Batuman

“With you, there’s more instability and tension because I know you’re making up a story too, and in your story I’m just a character”

- Batumann’s The Idiot (p. 367)

“The Chomskians viewed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the vilest slander—not just incorrect, but hateful, like saying that different races had different IQs. Because all languages were equally complex and identically expressive of reality, differences in grammar couldn’t possibly correspond to different ways of thinking. “Thought and language are not the [same] thing,” the professor said […]

In my heart, I knew that Whorf was right. I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.

[…]

There were things about -miş that I liked: it had a kind of built-in bewilderment, it was automatically funny. At the same time, it was a curse, condemning you to the awareness that everything you said was potentially encroaching on someone else’s experience, that your own subjectivity was booby-trapped and set you up to have conflicting stories with others. It compromised and transformed everything you said. It actually changed the verb tense you used. And you couldn’t escape. There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making onlyfactual statements about direct observations. You were forced to us -miş, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.”

— Elif Batuman, The Idiot