Gary Shteyngart Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck.

Gary Shteyngart
On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times.

Gary Shteyngart
She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.

Gary Shteyngart
In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.

Gary Shteyngart
I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.

Gary Shteyngart
Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.

Gary Shteyngart
A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

Gary Shteyngart
My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me.

Gary Shteyngart
Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

Gary Shteyngart
Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

Gary Shteyngart
I reveled in the smallness, the coziness of an upstairs bedroom in a traditional American Cape Cod house the half-floor that forces you to duck, to feel small and naive again, ready for anything, dying for love, your body a chimney filled with odd, black smoke. These square, squat, awkward rooms are like a fifty-square-foot paean to teenage-hood, to ripeness, to the first and last taste of youth.

Gary Shteyngart
The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.

Gary Shteyngart
We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.

Gary Shteyngart
It is a capital insult in this country not to make love to a naked woman, even if she is related to you.

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

Gary Shteyngart
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.

Gary Shteyngart
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!

Gary Shteyngart
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.

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

Gary Shteyngart
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.

Gary Shteyngart
In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.

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

Gary Shteyngart
I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?

Gary Shteyngart
The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons — it was systemic and it was complete.

Gary Shteyngart
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.

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

Gary Shteyngart
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.

Gary Shteyngart
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.

Gary Shteyngart