The Possessed Quotes

“I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“A few times I saw a chicken walking around importantly, like some kind of a regional manager.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound 'hay hay.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“Every morning I called Aeroflot to ask about my suitcase. "Oh, it's you," sighed the clerk. "Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase *resignation of the soul*?”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“First my copy was sent back to me with a note: "Please call ASAP regarding portrayal of Cossacks as primitive monsters." It turned out that my copy was lacking in cultural sensitivity toward Cossacks. I tried to explain that, far from calling Cossacks primitive monsters, I was merely suggesting that others had considered Cossacks to be primitive monsters. The coordinator, however, said that this was my mistake: others didn't consider Cossacks to be primitive monsters; in fact, "Cossacks have a rather romantic image."

I considered quoting to her the entry for Cossack in Flaubert's Dictionary of Received ideas: "Eats tallow candles"; but then the burden of proof would still be on me to show that tallow candles are a primitive form of nourishment. Instead I adopted the line that the likelihood of any Cossacks actually attending the exhibit was very slim. But the editor said this wasn't the point, "and anyway you never know in California.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“...as for unhappy families, star-crossed lovers, and exiled heroes, they are simply universal.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for?”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“I spent the next two weeks flopped on my grandmother's super-bourgeois rose-colored velvet sofa, consuming massive quantites of grapes, reading obsessively.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia's alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“Each work of criticism is supposed to build on the body of work, to increase the total sum of human understanding. It's not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It's supposed to be cumulative - it believes in progress.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“The anecdote appears in Théophile Gautier's 1859 biography of Balzac. I wondered if it could be shown that Babel had read Gautier. Then I wondered whether there was anything to eat at home. There wasn't. I got in my car and was driving down El Camino Real when my cell phone started ringing.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“There are strange friendships,” Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in Demons. “Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die.” A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even “realized” the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: “You’re going to die. And you’re going to die. And you’re going to die.” I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“At the first such gathering, I politely sat with them for half an hour, drank some vodka, and even recited a toast about how great it was that Gulya had such great friends. This proved to be a tactical error, since afterward Gulya wanted me to drink vodka and recite toasts with them every night, which was not compatible with my program of study of the great Uzbek language.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“Thinking about Don Quixote, I began to wonder about other possible methods for bringing one’s life closer to one’s favorite books. From Cervantes onward, the method of the novel has typically been imitation: the characters try to resemble the characters in the books they find meaningful. But what if you tried something different—what if you tried study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor? What if, instead of going out into your neighborhood pretending to be the hero of Amadís of Gaul, you instead devoted your life to the mystery of its original author, learned Spanish and Portuguese, tracked down all the scholarly experts, figured out where Gaul is (most scholars think Wales or Brittany)—what if you did it all yourself, instead of inventing a fictional character? What if you wrote a book and it was all true?”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“While it’s true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can’t do that, what’s it good for?”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“My mother believed that people harbored essential stances of like or dislike toward others, and betrayed these stances in their words and actions. If you came out looking terrible in a photograph, it was a sign that the person who took it didn’t really like you.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“[He] shrugged, stepping almost imperceptibly aside; he had a catlike talent, probably perfected over long years of practice, for evading potentially violent situations.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“[He] had a deep, mesmerizing, immediately recognizable voice, as well as a rhetorical talent for provoking conflicts with one hand while smoothing them over with the other, making concessions and winning them at the same time, producing the impression on everyone involved that great, collegial, and somehow intimate progress was being made in the working out of ideas.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“Those were cities with archives, university presses, libraries— cities where students went to learn from books, not “life.” And they were right, those students: I had seen life, and it hadn’t added up to anything.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“Meanwhile, Navoi uses Ulughbek’s astronomy to refute his astrology, arguing that his charts prove the invariance of the stars— their essential disconnectedness from ever-changing human destinies.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“On that journey, Pushkin returned to the lands he first visited at age twenty-one […] Everything was different now: “Whatever feelings I harbored then— no longer exist. They all either passed or changed.” Pushkin turned thirty on that second trip.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“The nail in the coffin of my brief career as a linguist was probably a seminar I took that winter about the philosophy of language. The aim of this seminar was to formulate a theory that would explain to a Martian "what it is that we know when we know a language." I could not imagine a more objectless, melancholy project. The solution turned out to consist of a series of propositions having the form "'Snow is white' is true iff snow is white." The professor, a gaunt logician with a wild mane of red hair and a deep concern about Martians, wrote this sentence on the board during nearly every class, and we would discuss why it wasn't trivial. Outside the window, snow piled deeper and deeper.

(...)

I had expected linguistics (the general study of language) to resemble a story, and Russian (the study of a particular language) to resemble a set of rules, but the reality was just the opposite.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“In fact I had no historical consciousness in those days, and no interest in acquiring one. It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way. Why be a slave to the arbitrary truth? I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years – it took the experience of lived time – to realize that they really are the same thing.”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“linguist called Alla who advised us, among other things, to treat our more stupid students with sympathy, “as if they had cancer.” While”
― Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them