Quotes from Gary Shteyngart

Creative thinking, working with your mind, that's my number-one prescription for longevity. If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

Heavy use of a special hypoallergenic organic air freshener is encouraged at Post-Human Services, because the scent of immortality is complex.

Negronis, cigarettes snuck. What could he do? His friend had begged him to come up, and the now-muted city would be more depressing still. "So who else is coming?" Ed asked. "Besides the Exalted One." He was referring to the famous actor who was coming up for a few days to work on a screenplay with Senderovsky, the source of his friend's anxiety. "Karen, you said." "Vinod, too." "Haven't seen him in ages. Is

Yes, the revolution was coming for them, too. How many revolutions would they have to live through during the never-ending historicity of their goddamned lives?

Leo was a fifty-something Athenian intellectual who had tried to convince Barry that the Greek gods were better, or at least more curious and interesting, than the main Judeo-Christian one, whom he saw as a collector of sorts, never happy with his last acquisition, always too busy to maintain the pieces he already owned.

Seema agreed with him, although a part of her, no, most of her, wanted to be emotionally moved, to replace her fears of Trump with the love of country that Hamilton so implicitly promised.

Maybe there really only was one singular white man staring down at the world from his official boots and his official vehicle and his official sunglasses hanging high over his official smirk.

She's the most beautiful and smart woman I've ever met," he liked to tell his friends after they had stopped loving each other.

This red-fading-into-brown defines Queens for me; it is quiet and melancholy and postsuccessful, vaguely British in its disposition.

They drank a cheap Hungarian riesling that spelled "headache" after the third glass. They held hands. The lights were going out at the Garibaldi nursing home across the street, a five-story residence built in the sixties to prove how closely a building could resemble Formica.

He worried that when he would speak of the past, he would sound and look old, as all ancient storytelling men did.

But what kind of profession is this, writer?" my mother would ask. "You want to be this?" I want to be this.

Like a long-haul jet, their building was divided into economy, business, and first.

As soon as one acquired a liberal education, huge parts of life became an elaborate joke. Maybe that's what you paid for when your parents' check cleared with the bursar--the rights to the joke.

In her bones, this may still be her country. But she will not touch it with her hands the way I do, trying to lyricize the filth and the decay.

This is the superhumanity of the immigrant, but woe be to the all-too-human offspring living in the shadow of such strength.

They drove to a mall in a former industrial building called Ponce City Market, which was like Chelsea Market in New York, only it was in Atlanta. They climbed up the elevated tracks to a new park called the BeltLine, which was just like the High Line in New York, only it was also in Atlanta.

In old age, their interests bent toward each other's like never before. Gardening, complaining, looking things up on the Internet.

I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live.

the physical world is the only salvation from a mind constantly churning away at itself. At

Honesty and grace. You can try to find something better beyond that, but you won't.

That spring and summer it became impossible to glance out the window without entertaining questions of physics, of multiverses collapsing onto themselves, of time lines breaking off like Antarctic ice shelves. Was all this really happening: masks and tyrants, aerosol sprays and gun-toting clowns?

cheeses so filled with aromatic herbs they inspired memories that had never happened.

the physical world is the only salvation from a mind constantly churning away at itself.