Jordan

“In Moscow you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don’t know anybody and where nobody knows you, and you don’t feel all the same that you’re a stranger. And here you know everybody and everybody knows you, and you’re a stranger... and a lonely stranger.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters

“Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

“Adams was both a devout Christian and an independent thinker, and he saw no conflict in that.”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“If only my heart were stone.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road