The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We’ve always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.

During the terrible years of the Yekhov terror I spent seventeen months in the prison queues in Leningrad. One day someone ‘identified’ me. Then a woman with lips blue with cold who was standing behind me, and of course had never heard of my name, came out of the numbness which affected us all and whispered in my ear—(we all spoke in whispers there): ‘Could you describe this?’ I said, ‘I can!’ Then something resembling a smile slipped over what had once been her face.

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.

It is unbearably painful for the soul to love silently.

A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me.

No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.