Anytime I can get either of them really laughing, I immediately pull out a pad of paper write the joke down, regardless of where we are or what we're doing. I must be absolutely insufferable.

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.