01UndatedJoshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
02UndatedAnd 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 / quote ↗
03UndatedMichigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
04UndatedAfter all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
05UndatedMaybe this is who I really am.Not a loner, exactly.But someone who can be alone.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
06UndatedAll love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
07UndatedThese are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don't have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over at the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they'll send troops.""We don't want the United Nations" Mr. Nanabragov said. "We don't want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We're better tan that. We want America.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
08UndatedShe 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 / quote ↗
10UndatedForget 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 / quote ↗
11UndatedWe 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 is you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
12UndatedWithout humor, I cannot go on and I doubt many of my readers would go on either. Humor is so important. I am here to have fun here with my work.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
13UndatedThe best thing about the iPhone is this that tells me where I am all the time. There's never a need to feel lost anymore.Gary Shteyngart / quote ↗
