Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day a….

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then e….

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it..

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild..

Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro a….

How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards..

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in yo….

That’s what’s so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity.….

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But ….

Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and ….

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer..

I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger..

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world..

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt..

If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for….

There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest po….

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every peta….

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards..

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, yo….

I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you ….

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when t….