All things are strange which are worth knowing.

When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.

You look like a winter night", he had told her when he had given it to her. "I could sleep inside the cold of you".

We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.

Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.

... relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.