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Was that the source of the humor: the disjuncture between how serious it felt and how trivial it really was?
the kind of soft cries that conveyed, in movies, that what was happening was simultaneously against a person’s will or judgment, but was also what they most wanted.
He tried not to show that he was upset when blood got on his skull pillow.
Maybe you would feel happier if you had more responsibilities.”
about
In fact I had been right: it did feel, by comparison, more bearable and legitimate.
she had never been happy, and never would be happy, but that she would come to him in Moscow.
subtle and understated
They discussed whether it was a “redemption” that he was able to feel love for a woman who was banal and wore a gray dress.
broke all the rules of storytelling, because there was no climax or resolution.
Yet almost everything he said caused me pain.
had annoyed me with its self-congratulatory, pro-police tone. The thing with the photocopy machine sounded illegal.
There is a wrongness underlying the machinery.
phrase that sounded weird to me when used about boys.
it was unfair that only the girl was allowed to behave that way.
They were looking at the painting that I had known someone would compare to a vagina.
Mia said something that betrayed a confusion between Baudelaire and Baudrillard. Noor downplayed the error, and Lakshmi added, “Yeah, what’s a hundred years’ difference?” Noor froze Lakshmi out the whole night and, when she confronted him, he told her he hadn’t known she could be cruel.
felt relieved to learn that there was some logic, after all, behind who ended up with whom, because this plan sounded crazy to me, and yet I could imagine a person different from me thinking it would be fun. Clearly, Lara was such a person, and that was why she and Juho were together.
It wasn’t the most glamorous part of life, or the one that was most often discussed, but it was so constant, like a heartbeat,
How hard I had tried to like those trips to Ankara,
was it possible that how hard my mother worked was part of why it had been depressing?
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.
but simply to exist on their hinges, regulating access to rooms.
what was value, if it wasn’t conferred by some people? A daunting thought:
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?”
understanding the point of sex felt just like understanding the point of Shakespeare.
“Who is this?” she demanded, though she was the one who had called.
Unlike my feelings, which were dimensionless and followed me wherever I went, he was person-sized and staying here.
Weeping, a powerful physical process that was normally out of the question, became a constant possibility. This seemed to prove the material reality of thoughts and feelings.
The tears that were closer to me now, because of Mesut, filled my eyes.
Rumi hadn’t been attached to the idea of people being from different countries, and generally invoked Turkishness in order to destabilize it.
Why had I assumed that the problem was with my Turkish—that the problem was with me? That was something girls did.
Maybe it was because a treehouse was a house you could have a claim to as a child—because you had built it, or you could plausibly have built it. For once you weren’t in debt to an unfathomable world built by expensive machinery.
It was a great comfort to me that Ralph found Isabel as interesting as Isabel did—that Isabel wasn’t the only one who found herself interesting.
“For weak people I have no doubt it’s a greater happiness.”
she liked people to be different from each other,
Thinking of the people who populated my life, who acted, spoke, and viewed the world so differently—Mesut, Juho, Lakshmi, Riley, and all the others—I recognized how important it was for me that I could understand them all, at least a little bit, and better than they could understand each other.
Was that what a novel was: a plane where you could finally juxtapose all the different people, mediating between them and weighing their views?
“none of the consciousness of genius,”
was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.
All the scenes where Isabel sat in a chair and realized things were amazing.
