Quotes from Gary Shteyngart

Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.

Do not throw away your heart. Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters ... Throw away your ancestors! ... Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath ... Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work -- learn to choose. You are good enough, you are HUMAN ENOUGH, to choose!

By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.

I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I'm not in love with him.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

Maybe this is who I really am. Not a loner, exactly. But someone who can be alone.

Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

If we can't take care of each other now, when the world is going to shit, how are we ever going to make it?

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.

Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it's not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. "You're my sacred ones," I told the books. "No one but me still cares about you. But I'm going to keep you with me forever. And one day I'll make you important again." I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.

She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn't want to sully myself with their weakness anymore.

freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.

We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.

That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.