I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever does catch up with one's actual age. Personally I feel like I just got the hang of thirty-five.

Elif Batuman

Categorized in : Thinking Age Identity

For a Nabokov fan, paging through 'Fine Lines,' which includes a critical introduction and several essayistic evaluations of Nabokov's scientific oeuvre, can feel a bit like reading the second half of 'Pale Fire': one is confronted by a content-rich, almost dementedly tangential commentary on an increasingly inscrutable work.

feel reading fire work

When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things.

nobody alone feel things

Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.

picture patient enough character

For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood.

story childhood christmas life

At the beginning of 'A Christmas Carol,' Scrooge embodies one of the central tenets of depression: that one has always been this way - and always will be.

beginning christmas depression way

My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey's top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers and professors.

parents medical country school