The Idiot Quotes
"You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers."
"It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time."
"The dictionary didn’t include 'ratatouille' or 'Tasmanian devil.'"
"I didn’t understand what a psychedelic poster was, so she showed me her psychedelic notebook."
"I tried not to give too much weight to the thing about the fish, but after a while it started to get me down anyway."
"On the subject of her work, Carol said only, 'I wear many hats.'"
"You had to sit in a basement writing essays about whether it was better to be a Renaissance person or a specialist."
"That was the first time I saw the Times Literary Supplement. I couldn’t understand anything in the Times Literary Supplement."
"The linguistics professor, a gentle phonetician with a mild speech impediment, specialized in Turkic tribal dialects."
"The worst part of the literature class came at the end when the professor answered questions."
"I told her she could have it. She put it on the shelf next to the dictionary she had gotten in high school, for being the valedictorian."
"The Boston T was completely different from the New York subway—the lines named after colors, the cars so clean and small, like toys."
"It was time to break for lunch. After we got back, we were going to go to the museums and demand to see the things they weren’t showing us."
"My half-brother, who was five, still wasn’t over Halloween. It was all he wanted to talk about."
"The Army Navy glove rack was dominated by giant multicolored tasseled mittens from Central America."
"I really didn’t want to go to Constructed Worlds, and then I saw a Red Cross sign and remembered how Svetlana had donated blood, and thought that if I did it too, I might miss part of class."
"In the hall after class, Hannah and her premed friends were joking about how they would sabotage someone called Daniel who always broke the curve."
"Whenever I’m worried about anything, I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important."
"You can’t be unconventional in every aspect of life. People will get the wrong idea."
"For the benefit of the Martians, we spent hours trying to put things like metaphor and malapropism into logic notation."
"In Russian class, nobody cared about truth conditions. We all said, 'I have five brothers.'"
"It’s as if he has been decapitated. Yet he does not appear to be dead. He is talking, and moving, like a live person. What a paradox!"
"In a portrait, you just see someone’s head, without their body. But people don’t assume that the person in the portrait has been decapitated."
"Every night I went to bed around midnight, closed my eyes, thought a lot of jumbled thoughts, turned the lights back on, and read until four."
"There was a kind of set that was open and closed at the same time."
"You don’t actually know a thing about this fellow, do you? It’s possible he doesn’t exist at all."
"If you wanted to talk to Imre about anything, without it turning into a competition, you had to give him wine first."
"Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources."
"I wanted to tell someone what was happening, but I didn’t know how or who."
"I never had a halogen lamp before, or seen one. I loved that lamp."
"I thought about it. I had no idea if I liked animals."
"It was almost physically impossible to read."
"It’s so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious."
"I could feel the fabric of reality crumbling around me."
"The eternal pauper in the great marketplace of ideas and of the world, I had nothing to teach anyone."
"We often despise that which is most useful to us."
"I don’t want you to memorize and regurgitate, I want you to understand the elegant logic of each mechanism."
"Love at first sight is possible only because you recognize a type."
"You have the best heart and mind, and whatever you do is right."
"We’ve exhausted each other. We’ve proved that we’re both finite personalities."
"Sometimes people want to be punished for their sins."
"You could be my European traveling companion, like in a novel."
"So if you die suddenly you won't go to hell."
"Often some prowling nocturnal animal, a hedgehog or a weasel, would rustle through the foliage."
"The pink whipped foam formed meaningful-looking patterns on the white fabric."
"Stuff like that can really bring out the sadist in you."
"I'm standing there thinking of all the different ways I'll rip out this guy's guts."
"We're flying over Iceland. It was five in the morning, Boston time."
"You're not supposed to be making small talk."
"Suddenly this abstract language is leaving third-degree burns on your skin."
"I think you see yourself as an automaton in the hands of Ivan."
"I can't believe the number of prostitutes. Every time I come, it's worse."
"I understood that the rest of my life would consist of causing Ivan to lug that suitcase in and out of his mother’s old car, for all our days."
"A plastic-lined canal was full of fat sleek orange carp, with gauzy fins and plaintive round mouths opening and closing. They wanted, and wanted."
"'It looks just like in a movie about a concentration camp!' Dawn exclaimed, pulling her shirt over her head and stepping out of her panties."
"'You say yes, I say no. You say stop, and I say go, go, go.'"
"There was a long silence. 'I am bored,' he said. 'Sorry, it’s a mistake. Not bored—boring.'"
"It made such a strong impression on me when she said that. Just for a moment, as if in a flash of lightning, I seemed to glimpse some unseen vista stretching out before me and opening in all directions before it went dark again."
"I felt so relieved to see the food disappearing into his little body."
"The whole world could be redescribed in terms of oszlop."
"'I don’t think he’s very good at his job,' Cheryl replied."
"Everyone wanted to take a trip together at the end of the program."
"In cultures where everyone is starving, the standard of beauty is less skinny."
"The sensation was both new and familiar, like a song I’d heard incompletely a long time ago."
"Nóra was sobbing with the terrifying abandon of children, as if she would never be consoled."
"A red bus was speeding toward us from the left, a blue bus from the right."
"Because she believes that everyone has constipation."
"I would have eaten a bucket of those cucumbers, which had been pickled in the sun, without vinegar."
"The primitive man’s cave was at the top of a steep hill."
"I think we could ask each other questions, like a game, with rules."
"And you are different? You do not love truth?"
"It might not be a bad idea for us to get some sleep."
"There is no suffering if you don’t want anything."
"I can’t understand it. When you eat needless things, you will get fat."
"I’m hungry all the time. I’ve never been full—not once."
"I saw now that he was taller than me, with hazel eyes."
"Various mothers had given me provisions for the trip: several peaches, a bag of yellow plums, a kilogram of cookies, and six rum chocolate bars."
"The train came into sight, rumbling closer, bringing the feeling of aliveness and plenitude inherent to incoming trains."
"The worst part was the descent. You could feel your soul sloshing around in your body, bouncing around in there like goat shit on a boat."
"I tried to call the lab, but the AT&T code didn’t work—you had to buy phone tokens."
"The last time we met, you were shorter. Ah, so that’s why."
"All the way to Istanbul, the tiny plane rolled and pitched to and fro."
"There was something special about either her ticket or the way her baggage was to be handled, because of the international status held by her husband’s ship."
"Once, he broke a car by driving over an enormous boulder that was sitting right in the middle of the road."
"It was painful to feel at such cross-purposes with her."