Matt Wright

“I kept looking around the bleachers at the audience, middle-aged people in practical clothes. Every single one of them cared about love, but how much? A lot, or only a little bit? The opera went on for a long time. Eventually the two youngest people onstage got married, so we could all go home.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I'll have reached you.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. "These wolves seem upset at something," he observed. The next morning the cage was all twisted out of shape and the gray wolf Berserker was missing. Dracula had temporarily inherited its body. Dracula had a totally difference experience at the zoo from that of other people.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Svetlana said that she identified with that Madonna more than with any other woman in any other painting. She kept asking me what painting I identified with. I didn't identify with anyone in any paintings.

I finally identified with a painting in the Picasso Museum. Titled Le Buffet de Vauvenargues, it showed a gigantic black sideboard [...]

Svetlana said I had to take a more proactive view of my personhood. She said it wasn't okay to identify with furniture. Indeed, Sartre had illustrated "bad faith" using the analogy of thinking of oneself as a chair -- quite specifically, a chair. Objective claims could be made about a chair, but not about a person, because a person was in constant flux. I said the buffet was also in flux.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot