Elif Batuman quote ✍️

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.

He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of …

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren’t there, but might be. And even that didn’t matter if, in the end, readers needed something…

He looked around. The room, a few suitcases, some belongings, a handful of well-read books — a man needed few things to live. And it was good not to get used to many things when li…