Gessen Quotes

#1. Half of the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,' Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin.

Masha Gessen

#2. The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine.

Masha Gessen

#3. I think Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a genius. What she manages to do, linguistically and emotionally, in the span of a single sentence, is astonishing.

Keith Gessen

#4. Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent.

Masha Gessen

#5. such as first-grader Vladimir's sporting a wristwatch,

Masha Gessen

#6. He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write.

Keith Gessen

#7. Before the Second World War, more than nine million Jews were living in Europe, most of them in lands that were or had been part of the Russian Empire.

Masha Gessen

#8. Rigidity is always the opposite of the search for truth.

Masha Gessen

#9. Fame - fame was the anti-death. But it seemed to slither from his grasp, seemed to giggle and retreat, seemed to hide behind a huge oak tree and make farting sounds with its hands.

Keith Gessen

#10. You say that like she edited Ulysses," I said. "I don't care!" said my friend. "It was a No. 1 best-seller!" VII.

Keith Gessen

#11. Like Solzhenitsyn, I believe that in the end, words will break cement. Solzhenitsyn wrote, "So the word is more sincere than concrete? So the word is not a trifle? Then may noble people begin to grow, and their word will break cement."

[Nadya Tolokonnikova's closing statement]

Masha Gessen

#12. Faced with a brass band that was positioned to drown out free speech, Russian activists reacted to the potential confrontation with lemons. With activists eating lemons or pretending to, involuntary saliva reaction of the band made it impossible for them to interrupt.

Masha Gessen

#13. Honestly," he says, "I judge writers on how they write queries. If you're a good writer, you're a good writer." And if not, then not.

Keith Gessen

#14. Angleterre Hotel,

Masha Gessen

#15. It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

Masha Gessen

#16. When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

Masha Gessen

#17. Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art -- something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts -- a great work of art is always a miracle.

Masha Gessen

#18. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty,

Masha Gessen

#19. As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children

Masha Gessen

#20. When you're part of the opposition you want to stay. It's part of your identity. You're useless if you leave. You feel like you have failed.

Masha Gessen

#21. It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.

Masha Gessen

#22. Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the growing mountains of useless information produced by the KGB.

Masha Gessen

#23. The ability to discuss things was still the most highly valued commodity in the Soviet Union.

Masha Gessen

#24. The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping.

Masha Gessen

#25. She had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging.

Keith Gessen

#26. It was in May 1934 that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR granted Birobidzhan the status of the Jewish Autonomous Region, a major step toward achieving the coveted status of a national republic, the apogee of Soviet-style autonomism. At

Masha Gessen

#27. They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies.

Masha Gessen

#28. One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.

Keith Gessen

#29. Are you putting on airs?

Masha Gessen

#30. To create, and to confront, one has to be an outcast.

Masha Gessen

#31. The sanatorium itself was charming, a group of cabins in the woods, a place for overworked urbanites to feel pleasantly melancholic. A slackertorium.

Keith Gessen

#32. And so in addition to lots of reading, the life of an editor involves constantly trying to get others to read as well.

Keith Gessen

#33. No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own influence.

Masha Gessen