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“She sat at the fireside and rummaged in the fire with the tongs, she thought about the baby and saw him with blue eyes and sharp teeth, it seemed to her that as soon as he was born he would have a whole lot of wolf-like teeth in his mouth”

"There is no secret, Tom, or else there are hundreds of them, and none of them interesting enough for you."

“It was the frozen blue of her eyes that he could not bear.”

“In reality it can be night-time whenever you like – those things we like about night-time, we can have them whenever we like if we just decide to have them”

“The creature was gibbering in its corner. The hammering and the voices and the barking dog grew fainter, and, “Oh God,” he thought, “what a bloody silly way to die…”

“Besides, he stole because he knew the world was badly arranged and people lived by stealing, by tearing the shirts off each other’s backs,”

“It was strange that sleep had come to mean so much. She resisted it for most of her life. As a young person she found it a darkly boring prospect, all that waste of fun and thought, and as an adult was fearful that its oblivion was too close to death”

“I’d argue you can rarely spoil a good story, because the joy is in the journey rather than the arrival.”

"Things weren't too good with money, but money is money and happiness is something else."

“Death is like love. In the final moments, there’s nothing but darkness…Terrifying, ugly convulsions…You can’t come back from death, but we do recover from love. And we can remember the way things were before…”

“—Something is bound to happen. And soon. It’s not a revolution yet, but you can smell the ozone in the air. Everyone is waiting: Who, what, when?
—I just started living well. Let me live a little!!!
—Russia is sleeping. Don’t even dream about change.”

“You know how beach romances go, they don’t last long. They’re flings. Like life, but in miniature. They sparkle and fade, it’s pretty. Like what we don’t get to have in real life and what we really want. That’s why people love traveling so much…meeting people…”

“Any future is unknown—but sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny’s natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thought rebounds.

“on his father's advice, he had taken his aunt a large box of chocolates, half of which he had himself eaten and the remainder of which he had rearranged so that it would not be noticed”

"First taste of the cold city air and he's crossing over to Chancery Park. Everything in shades of deep liquid darkness, the sky, the street, the grass enclosed behind its railings. December evenings, safe at last from the onslaught of raw daylight, the city reveals its hidden face of sublime velvet blue. Row of terraces as he passes, Christmas trees in the windows glittering. Hands in pockets against the cold.”

“They each had their own happiness to think of. Striving restless spirits, both. Ivan and their father different. Acceptance in their nature: yes, mute bewildered acceptance of life’s inexplicable cruelties. And now not even that.”

“Doing mundane activities side by side with death…it’s dangerous…You risk confusing the two”

“Life in Russia is like fiction. But I want to live here, among Soviet people…And watch Soviet films. They might be full of lies and made-to-order for the government, but I love them.”

“It’s like you said, you can drive yourself crazy thinking about these things. The other lives you could have had. And the life you did have, after it’s over – where did it go? I mean, what are you supposed to do with it?”

“You, with your Shakespeare. And once it’s out of the bottle, that’s it. I don’t know where you’ve been, but it’s handed you the ability to think you can invent your life and own your death.”

“In our family, we knew how to care for other people, but not each other.”

“Say something during the day, and the birds will hear—speak at night, and the mice will.”

“Some people’s lives are about their parents and some aren’t.”

“We don’t want to suffer. That’s not what our lives are about. We haven’t understood a thing about the world we’d only recently been living in and yet we’re already living in a new one.”

"Sometimes you don't even want a thing. You just can't bear anyone else to have it."

“I didn’t drink to get sad. I drank to get away from sadness.”

“I was probably trying to make him jealous, which is so sad I’m going to eat a whole bag of frozen perogies right now.”