Elif Batuman Quotes

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

It may be that the seemingly intrinsic attraction that past time has for me is merely a desire for escapism, as I look out at the nation and world with little optimism.

And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking into these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!

The old happiness is unreturning. Boy's griefs are not so grievous as youth's yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost / The desires for all that was most desirable, / Before you are contented with what you can desire; / Before you know what is left to be desired; / And you go on wishing that you could desire / What desire has left behind.

This world can only give me reminders of what I don't have, can never have, didn't have for long enough.

It just wasn't the fairy tale I had hoped for.

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

It's so easy to get caught up in this weird life. This isn't normal and I'm not singing for people that live my life. I'm singing to the life I used to have. The life I want to have again.

My favorite songs to sing have always been songs about regret. I don't know why that is, but to me, that's country music.

What I want back is what I was.

Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it's pain. Pain concerning the past.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

My days are gone a-wandering.

I miss the game - I miss it a lot.

I always say I was born too late in the world, too old.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

Of joys departed, not to return, how painful the remembrance.

I'm quite disappointed that I'll never relive my teenage years.

There is no past that we can bring back to us by the longing for it.

I wish I had never left England