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Keith Gessen Quotes


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Quotes by Keith Gessen

Showing 11-20 of 38 Quotes by Keith Gessen

To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up.

~Keith Gessen

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I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother's womb, though I've since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns.

~Keith Gessen

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While I was in Astana, a ballet master from St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre staged a performance of 'Giselle' in the opera hall. It was one of only a few performances to grace Astana's concert spaces in many weeks, and tickets were impossible to come by.

~Keith Gessen

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After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso.

~Keith Gessen

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Left Bank Astana was beautiful at night, each building, it seemed, with its own nighttime color scheme and the street lamps all going full blast.

~Keith Gessen

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I think that the basement where Orwell washed dishes in Paris was his first lesson in anti-humbug - and part of the lesson is that you have to keep renewing it. And Orwell did that.

~Keith Gessen

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Being a Russian oligarch these days isn't easy. The best and brightest of them are in exile or in jail; others, after feasting on leverage during the commodities boom, now have tummies full of debt.

~Keith Gessen

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Astana has been the capital of Kazakhstan only since 1997, three years after Nazarbayev told a stunned parliament that a prosperous, independent country like Kazakhstan ought to have its capital 'in the center' of the country, rather than on the border.

~Keith Gessen

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My grandmother was content to sit in the back yard wearing her old, wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible bushes.

~Keith Gessen

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The sudden collapse of the monarchy that had ruled Russia for three hundred years led to chaos. Russia immediately became, as one participant put it, 'the freest country in the world.'

~Keith Gessen

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Novelist

Born: January 9th, 1975

Links

Find Keith Gessen on Amazon

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