I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.

I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.

For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now - yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman. Friendship is far more human.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

And the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.