Absurdistan Quotes

“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

“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, Absurdistan

“Whatever you may think of Judaism, Lyuba, in the end it’s just a codified system of anxieties.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“From the moment I bought my ticket, I had a premonition I wasn’t returning to New York anytime soon.

You Know, this happens a lot to Russians. The Soviet Union is gone, and the borders are as free and passable as they’ve ever been. And yet, when a Russian moves between the two universes, this feeling of finality persists, the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok. It was like those mathematical concepts I could never understand in high school: if, then. If Russia exists, then the West is a mirage; conversely, if Russia does not exist, then and only then is the West real and tangible. No wonder young people talk about “going beyond the cordon” when they talk of emigrating, as if Russia were ringed by a vast cordon sanitaire. Either you stay in the leper colony or you get out into the wider world and maybe try to spread your disease to others.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“These kinds of lost, overeducated mama’s boys were perpetually stumbling down a corridor with two distant exits, one marked HESITANT INTELLECTUAL and the other SHYSTER.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“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, Absurdistan

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

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

“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, Absurdistan

“Alyosha-Bob and I have an interesting hobby that we indulge whenever possible. We think of ourselves as The Gentlemen Who Like To Rap. Our oeuvre stretches from the old school jams of Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Public Enemy to the sensuous contemporary rhythyms of ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica. The modern reader may be familiar with 'Ass-N-Titties' by DJ Assault, perhaps the seminal work of the genre”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“I crammed a handful of Ativan into his mouth and flooded that orifice with forty ounces of Coca-Cola from the cup holder. 'This is going to take effect immediately,' I lied. 'Breathe, Mr. Sakha, breathe. Would you like me to sing a calming Western song? My name is Luka', I sang. 'I live on the second floor.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“{I'm partial to anyone who looks half blind)”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“I’ll always associate self-laundered socks with democracy and the primacy of the middle class.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“You should listen mainly to East Coast Hip Hop and Ghetto Tech from Detroit. We must reject European music categorically, even so called Progressive House.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“Almost all had ill-grown mustaches and sported pinkish sun-bleached sandals meant for some nonexistent third gender, along with buzz haircuts that spoke of either nationalism or retardation.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

“These 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, Absurdistan