Quotes from Gary Shteyngart

What if we just went home and read books to each other?

Poor Sasha. Not meant for these times, Ed said. They were both somehow cheered up by this conversation. But he means well.

What she missed most about dating men was that small, disconcerting time frame when you thought that maybe you could change them.

My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?

I crammed a handful of Ativan into his mouth and flooded that orifice with forty ounces of Coca-Cola from the cup holder. 'This is going to take effect immediately,' I lied. 'Breathe, Mr. Sakha, breathe. Would you like me to sing a calming Western song? My name is Luka', I sang. 'I live on the second floor.

A man that rich couldn't be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of twenty-first-century America?

That in the face of smarter women it was best to beat a continuous retreat, to slash and burn one's own personal convictions before their sure-footed advance.

I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the cold. Scared of the heat. Scared of the ceiling fan at which I would point one tragic finger and start weeping. Scared of any height higher than my sickbed. Scared of Uncle Electric Current. Why was I so scared of everything? I ask my mother nearly forty years later. Because you were born a Jewish person, she says.

You go around and you do things and you don't know why you do them, she said. And that's the story of your gender writ large.

After he had taught himself to be friendly, everything else became harder. He had to let go of his nerdy passions. He couldn't do both at once.

It was the one time in my life I did something without thinking it through. People like me, people like you, all we think about is consequences. Practically from the day we're born. And look at our fucking lives.

It's okay to give up on a dream. The majority of dreams don't come true. Our whole country is learning as much.

She never backed down. A fighter to the very last. This is how a human being is forged after an unhappy early life. This is the independence of growing up, of standing up for yourself, even if against a phantom enemy.

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

Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way.

All love is socioeconomic. It's the gradients in status that make arousal possible.

The next eleven floors held a single apartment per floor and belonged to the principals of hedge funds and private equity firms and one Argentine model and her soccer player boyfriend who spent no more than a week out of the year in New York.

It's so difficult to go to a strange town, even in America. I went to Dayton once, when I was in a basketball camp...

Barry had always wondered why people who were just upper-middle class in New York chose to stay there, given that they could live like minor dictators in the rest of the country.

Your sister's the doctor," her father said. His pride in his daughters was almost hilarious to behold, like a summer hose spraying in all directions. Seema knew what he would say next. "One doctor, one lawyer. I'm covered for life.

If she got tired of the writer, she could probably marry a short, heavyset man on the middle rungs of private equity.

like a nobody, like a woman in regional sales gliding through airport lounges in the previrus era, always moving, always herself.

Now that they had moved back into the main house, Nat back into her tiny room (though she did have occasional sleepovers at Karen and Vinod's) and he and his wife into theirs, a familial charm had fallen over him, best exemplified by the contradictory smells of bacon in the mornings and Sabbath candles on Friday night. He

Dead is dead, we know where to file another person's extinction, but the artist purposely zoomed in on the living, or, to be more accurate, the forced-to-be-living and the soon-to-be-dead. Grainy