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I thought it was just as bad to be tormented to death by a relative or a landlord as to be shot in a death camp.
why boors, in general, were widely tolerated and promoted to high social positions: because they accurately gauged and reflected “the way of the world”?
she started defending him and listing good things he had supposedly done that I didn’t know about.
The realist novel was predicated on the contingency of everyday life,
How was one to be so artful that the end product seemed to be free of art?
Louis Aragon described Paris as a palimpsest of chance encounters.
though, I realized none of these things was actually a problem for me, so I just went to the library.
I wished there was a class where they could teach you how to calculate the right time to die.
It was a relief that the person they sent
to teach you ethics wasn’t some kind of asshole.
impermeably American
confidently international
their parents were the kind of rich people who thought it was harmful for their children
to be spared any kind of hassle.
But my parents were the only ones I knew who never acted like I owed them money for being alive,
I was so grateful that sometimes I sat in my room and cried.
This kind of touchiness was familiar to me from Turkish people, and gave me a fond, protective feeling.
(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?)
There were no women in that book with whom nobody thought about having sex.
Others seemed to have waterproofed their own persons as peremptorily as if they were lawn furniture.
I felt scornful of myself for knowing that.
Ugh. I refused to believe that dissimulation was more virtuous than honesty.
If there were rewards you got from lying, I didn’t want them.
In a way, it had been a test of what a person could achieve just through writing.
My parents sometimes remembered things differently from each other, and from me.
he had complained about
the sentimentalization of motherhood—how
how motherhood, “mother love,” was supposed to automatically make...
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On the one hand, I despised her for talking so much and saying so little,
When you were trying to solve a mystery, and you came across a name you had encountered earlier in your investigation,
it was a sign that you were on the right trail.
I had wanted to become a novelist before I even knew how to read,
when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough.
understood that a novel would explain all the things I still wanted to know,
The words, “tacos, beige,” written on a piece of looseleaf paper made me feel the foreclosing of every possibility of anything exciting ever happening to me in the rest of my life.
dissimilarity between the kind of writing I was always doing, and an actual novel.
It felt shameful to be so unartistic and self-obsessed, to not want to invent richly fictional characters.
the disorder you experienced in your childhood was somehow to your credit, or capitalizable upon in later life—even though, or precisely because, it was a discredit to your mother. So your credit and your mother’s credit were somehow at odds.
Why were other people’s coincidences always so boring?
it was somehow funny or admirable
Why was it that science and history could be boring, but other books couldn’t?
I wondered if she was in love, and whether the guy was an idiot.
a posteriori,
How unjust it was, when people treated the actual as limiting proof of the possible!
“not so much a thing as a way things happen,”
Was it supposed to be understood that she had been raped? It felt like that was often what was supposed to be understood in short stories.
what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn’t have a self I was secure with.
Didn’t the very essence of a fence reside in the fact that it was stationary?
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.
“I saw that your lights were on, so I thought I would knock at your door. But I decided to space the knocks very far apart, and then decrease the interval, to see how close the knocks have to be together, before they are perceived as knocking.”
