Gary Shteyngart > Quotes

“Remember this... develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“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, Super Sad True Love Story

“We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don't believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we're only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better then the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo's Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived your summertime best? What if you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“By reading this message you are denying its existence and implying consent.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“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, Super Sad True Love Story

“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, Super Sad True Love Story

“You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.”
― Gary Shteyngart

“Maybe this is who I really am.

Not a loner, exactly.

But someone who can be alone.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure

“Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“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?”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“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, Super Sad True Love Story

“I have my own dying empire to contend with, and I do not wish for any other.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“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, Super Sad True Love Story

“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, Super Sad True Love Story

“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, Super Sad True Love Story

“... I'm the fortieth-ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what! What if someday she lets me kiss each one of her freckles again? She has like a million. But every one of them means something to me. Isn't this how people used to fall in love? I know we're living in Rubenstein's America, like you keep saying. But doesn't that just make us even more responsible for each other's fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said no to all this. To this bar. To this FACing. The two of us. What if we just went home and read books to each other?”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

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

“freedom is anathema to dreams nurtured in captivity.”
― Gary Shteyngart

“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.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“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.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure

“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.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure

“That's what tyrants do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“Tutt'intorno a noi scorreva la città di Roma, splendida nella sua indifferenza, eternamente sicura di sé, felice di prendersi i nostri soldi e posare per una foto, ma senza avere alla fin fine bisogno di niente e di nessuno.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“I wish I were stronger and more secure in myself so that I could really spend my life with a guy like Lenny. Because he has a different kind of strength than Joshie. He has the strength of his sweet tuna arms. He has the strength of putting his nose in my hair and calling it home. He has the strength to cry when I go down on him. Who IS Lenny? Who DOES that? Who will ever open up to me like that again? No one. Because it's too dangerous. Lenny is a dangerous man. Joshie is more powerful, but Lenny is much more dangerous.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

“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, Absurdistan