Vera, or Faith Quotes

“So I'm only ten, she thought to herself. And then she imagined her future self, a middle-school Vera, a high-school Vera, a college Vera, a girlfriend Vera, a woman-in-STEM Vera, a mommy Vera, all looking back at this ten-year-old present-day, present-second Vera with all the pity and wonder and faith that older people needed to just get through the rest of their lives.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Not everyone could handle the pain of the world. It was like the religious ladies outside her school had written on their placards: WILL SUFFERING END? For some, it just couldn't.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“How much more could her heart break? A lot. It could and would break a lot more. There were, contrary to science, an infinite number of atriums and ventricles.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“But that's how the universe worked, Vera thought. You wanted to believe someone was in a pretty place like heaven, but really everybody, herself included, was living in hell.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“My poor Doxie,"Daddy finally said. "Our country's a supermarket where some people just get to carry out whatever they want. You and I sadly are not those people.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“We thought the pain of what was happening in this country wouldn't come to our doorstep. But it has.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“She hated that happiness and sadness were always forming a pretzel.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Being smart is one of the few things I have that I can be proud of."

"You're not proud of the fact that you're kind and curious and pretty?”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“You're going to be the president of your frat," Daddy had told him. Dylan considered this honor, then dropped his pants and screamed, "Look at my penis!" "See, you're halfway there," Daddy had said.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Although her parents both insisted that where one went to college did not matter, they certainly talked about colleges a lot.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Vera's monkey brain was "racing." She wanted someone to talk to her and to get some of her words out, but Daddy and the Seal had now switched to Russian and their conversation was growing more somber, because that's what Russian did to you. Her teacher, the other Vera, had never once smiled, even when reading the ostensibly funny book about a clumsy bear who failed to live by the complex rules of forest society and constantly needed to learn distsiplina (discipline) from his animal peers. "We can all use some more distsiplina," Teacher Vera would say. "It is what our vozhd"--or "leader"--"expects from us." Then she would show them the photograph of a man who looked like a sad but disciplined hamster in a suit in front of a tricolor flag.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Look at how Daddy and the Seal talk," Anne Mom would say to Vera. "Look at their body language, so relaxed." "Friendship must get a lot easier when you can start to drink," Vera remarked....”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Daddy liked his books in alphabetical order, but before big events Anne Mom paid Vera ten dollars to reorganize the books in such a way that authors "of color" and women were "front and center" at eye level.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Really, the key to being less odd was to develop your artificial intelligence. Daddy had once mentioned creating a computer program that would flash the most obvious next line of conversation right into your eye. You could go through the whole day thinking about important things and just letting the program prompt you every time you had to open your mouth.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“From her few visits to the homes of others, she knew kids were supposed to have more posters on their walls to show off their inner life, but she liked her inner life to stay inside her.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Daddy had a lot to say about white being able to start first in chess, with black being "subservient." He wanted his gravestone to read STRONG OPINIONS, but fortunately the actuarial tables said he had at least another forty years to go. Daddy was supposed to be so far left that it was hard to "even imagine it." Vera tried anyway. In her mind, she walked down the block, then turned left, then turned left again, and then turned left again, and then once again, but she ended up where she had started, back home. She told Daddy her metaphor and he laughed. "Yeah," he said, "but it's even worse in the other direction.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Make-work," Daddy called her homework, derisively, and it mostly was a continuation of the school day, the careful reordering of numbers, letters, and concepts that would vaunt them into the appropriate high school, the appropriate college, and, for those whose families had recently arrived, into the "gleaming anus of capitalist society" (Daddy, of course, for which he was severely "censured" by Anne Mom).”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Dyl-man. Doxie," Daddy said. He was on the big gray couch in his underwear, doing social media on his phone. Vera could tell because his mouth was open.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“WILL SUFFERING END? the sign read. Yeah, Vera thought, will it?”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

“Anne Mom was always predicting things in the near future. "I'm the Nostradamus of two weeks from now," she told Vera over and over again....”
― Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith