Quotes from Gary Shteyngart

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

Actor to Senderovsky: What awes you about the work you do? How does it humble you?

The Actor to Dee: You fall in love with yourself first. With who you want to be when interacting with the person you think you're in love with. Then maybe, if you loosen up a little, you fall in love with what the other person really is, but primarily you still love them because of how they enhance you. Now you just have all these backup reasons to love them.

Senderovsky to Ed: When I stopped falling in love. My art died.

He knew that he had been born in a sick country, a country now intent on spreading its disease to others through the social media channels and under the cover of night--its true gift of the moment.

Almost all had ill-grown mustaches and sported pinkish sun-bleached sandals meant for some nonexistent third gender, along with buzz haircuts that spoke of either nationalism or retardation.

I told her my father was a retired janitor who liked to go fishing. She told me her father was a podiatrist who liked to punch his wife and two daughters in the face.

town across the river. LOVE TAKES OFF MASKS THAT WE FEAR WE CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT AND KNOW WE CANNOT LIVE WITHIN.—JAMES BALDWIN

any life ending in death is essentially pointless.

This was the upshot of twenty marriage-counseling sessions at the feet of a fat older Jewish woman who looked like half of Barry's relatives from the Bronx, the Cohens' ancestral seat before his father had struck out for Long Island with its burgeoning collection of pools in need of cleaning.

Do not believe the Judeo-Christian lie!

She was missing more references than usual. White ignorant folk like me, she thought, we're the immigrants today.

If only beauty could explain the world away.

You don't want to end up in Troy," the

And you never felt like becoming an American? She didn't know why she was pressing him on this one point. That's for people without options, Ed said. Sorry, I mean... He trailed off. No, I get it. Nation in free fall.

All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze.

Nu, nu, do as you must, her patient replied, as if her entire existence was but an endless series of pushbacks and rejections.

What's that Russian saying about incompetent people trying to pass the blame?" Senderovsky laughed. " 'A bad dancer is bothered by his balls.

I think she's trying. Trying what? She's trying to figure it out. Aren't we all? No, I don't think so.

Only rarely had Barry seen women combine humor with success.

Virginia proper, a series of low Confederate fields bracketing the highway.

tikkun olam, or "repairing the world.

But he had to think like a character in a Chekhov play, forever taunted by desires but trapped in a life much too small to accommodate the entirety of a human being. That was why Chekhov was eternally beloved.

cheder, their eyes still glossy with scripture now