175 Quotes by Gary Shteyngart

I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.

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

Maybe this is who I really am.Not a loner, exactly.But someone who can be alone.

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.

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.

È questo che ammiro nella gioventù italiana, il lento scemare delle ambizioni, la consapevolezza che il meglio è di gran lunga alle spalle.Noi americani abbiamo molto da imparare dal loro declino pieno di grazia.

You go around and you do things and you don't know why you do them," she said. "And that's the story of your gender writ large.

Were all men separated from their children and wives by an invisible ribbon of cluelessness?

We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favored to win.