Ugly Americans Quotes

“When she was still a child, her daughter had asked Marina, ‘Why do Russians have such bad teeth and greasy hair?’

Marina could have answered this question, but she chose to remain silent; there would have been too much to explain, about how every culture had its own habits: Americans change their T-shirts twice a day and wash every time they come near a shower. But a Russian, from one generation to the next, washed once a week in the bathhouse, on Saturdays, and changed his underwear at the same time. Many of them lived in communal housing, where there was no bathroom at all. And she would also have had to talk about how every shabbily dressed Russian child at their age read as many books in a year as she and her brother were likely to read in a lifetime. And how every decent Russian adult knew as many poems by heart as a professor of philology in this country had ever known.”
― Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Лестница Якова