Elif Batuman : (3)

" There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive. " - Elif Batuman

" I grew up hearing that if it hadn’t been for Ataturk, my grandmother would have been ‘a covered person’ who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher. " - Elif Batuman

" The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was ‘Anna Karenina,’ which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad. " - Elif Batuman